Ongoing MacKeeper fraud
thesafemac.com
thesafemac.com
I think to be sure you need a combination like: ClaXmav (monitors predefined dirs and incoming mails), LittleSnitch (monitor outgoing connections) and SpamSieve to manage spam with Mail.app.
It's certainly not because they "feel lucky to have a machine that generally works most of the time and I don't need to defrag it, virus-scan it, memory-clean it, watch running processes for free RAM, and so on and so forth".
It's almost impressive, in a sad sad way. They've pretty much cornered the market on mac malware. Unfortunately they are the malware, not the solution.
It's despicable.
This is really strange to me because, like you, I thought OSX's native memory management ought to be optimal and tools like this are just placebos.
It actually forces OS X's native memory management to kick in.
It does this by using an obscene amount of memory for a very short amount of time. This forces OS X to clean up the existing RAM in use as the RAM used by Memory Cleaner builds up dramatically.
In this way its partially cosmetic since your RAM would be cleaned up if you used more of it anyway.
Perhaps if there was a significant performance hit incurred when dropping caches you may want to do it more eagerly.. but is there?
It looks like disk cache expiration is slow and tends to kick in when it's a bit too late. With the speed that modern apps chew through memory, I'm sent into a swap thrash and get sluggish response and beachballs.
MemoryKeeper on the App store seems to mostly clear the file cache and do some -fu to compact memory (maybe it's a memory defragment, the docs are a little lacking in technical details.) When I manually run it, everything runs great until the free memory dries up and I'm back in that alloc/swapthrash/cachepurge cycle again.
I wrote a tiny C program for linux to force cache expirations (in a very sloppy but reasonably portable way) back in '98 that I've started using again on osX, it fixes the issue and runs quite a bit quicker than MemoryKeeper. I can make it available if anyone else wants it.
However if you have a 4GB computer and generally single task, then a memory clean tool can work in your favour.
I have several virtual machines that start up overnight and close down in the morning, at that point I want my memory flushed to start a fresh with my applications not the VM's cached data, which wont be needed again for another 12 hours.
This is of course a corner case and just last week I upgraded to 16GB of RAM mitigating the requirement. But there is no one size fits all memory manager out there.
https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=store.mackeep...
I'm not saying it's the case here, but be cautious about blindly believing everything ssllabs.com reports.
As far as I remember it was a page with three suggestions, not unlike [1] and the last one was to install MacKeeper. MacKeeper was just mentioned, but not linked which appeared odd to me at the time. This was about two years ago.
Unfortunately I couldn't find the page anywhere, not even at archive.org.
It's kinda widespread software among mac users, because you can find banners literally in every website with disputable content like porn, torrents, subtitles, you-name-it.
Permission structure of *nix is the same, and fools can be fools anywhere. A 30% market share for linux doesn't mean 30% of computer users gain 100x the skill overnight.