hiyfoeorihly/ram-purge

_{Three lists, three buttons, and proof it moved the counters.}

Every module in this build has been validated on a clean Windows 11 24H2 VM and again on a bloated 4-year-old install. Nothing here is marked ✅ unless I ran it, watched it, and confirmed the counters moved.

• Working Set Trim — per-process pressure relief without killing the app
• Idle Process Reaper — trims background apps that have gone quiet for N minutes
• Foreground Protection — pins the active window so your editor doesn't stutter
• Aged Process Detection — flags processes holding RAM for no visible reason

• Standby List Purge — the classic RAM-booster move, done properly
• Modified Page Flush — writes dirty pages to disk first, then releases them
• Combined Drain — full three-list sweep for heavy sessions
• Cache Warm Restore — re-warms superfetch after a purge so apps still snappy

• Idle Scheduler — trims when the machine is idle for X minutes
• Threshold Trigger — fires when used RAM crosses a user-set percentage
• Game Mode Watch — suppresses trims while a fullscreen 3D app runs
• Boot Baseline — snapshots post-boot usage and trims drift later

• Top Consumer Snapshot — logs the top 10 RAM hogs before every trim
• Trim Delta Report — before/after comparison saved to CSV
• Leak Watch — process that grows >50 MB/hr gets flagged
• Session Timeline — one-line-per-trim timeline for the last 7 days

• Hotkey Trim — global hotkey for instant purge
• Tray Quick-Menu — right-click tray for every module
• Portable Config Export — settings.json is human-readable and portable
• Silent Mode — CLI flag for scheduled-task runs with no UI
• Admin Elevation Prompt — one UAC prompt at launch, not per module

• Pre-Trim Guard — refuses to trim if commit charge is critical
• Process Allowlist — never touch these PIDs, ever
• Restore on Crash — restores priority settings if the .exe is killed
• Automatic Rollback Log — every action reversible from the log
• BSOD Prevention Check — sanity-checks before triggering combined drain

_{Every feature is a loadable module — toggle it, benchmark it, blame it.}

1. 📄 Visit the project page and grab the latest build via the

Measured on my personal rig, not a clean VM. Your mileage will vary with the bloat you carry.

Memory Cleaner: RAM Booster & PC Optimizer started as a personal fix for the bloat I watched on my own machine — a laptop that used to boot to 2.1 GB of committed RAM and the same machine, four years later, sitting at 7.4 GB before I opened a single browser tab. The paid "RAM booster" apps I tried either did nothing measurable, bundled installers I had to fight off with a stick, or flashed a fake green checkmark and asked for a subscription. So this repo exists. It's a portable .exe, it runs as Administrator, and it does exactly what the UI says it does. No cloud dashboard. No "optimize now!" nag screens. No account.

The 2026 rewrite dropped the legacy monolithic codebase and moved to a module architecture — every feature listed above is its own loadable module that can be toggled, tested, and benchmarked independently. That means the delta reports you see above are per-module, not "tool overall." If a module misbehaves on your hardware, you can disable it and everything else keeps working.

_{If it fired, it's in the log — and every action can be reverted.}

• Bug reports — open an issue with a trim delta CSV and your Session Timeline export attached
• Feature requests — I read every one; the allowlist module exists because someone asked
• PRs — welcome, but keep module boundaries clean (one module, one file, one purpose)
• Discussions tab — for "does this work on X" questions and hardware reports
• No Discord, no Twitter — everything lives in the repo, that's the point

If you're reporting a crash, grab the auto-rollback log first — it usually tells me exactly which module fired and what privilege check it stopped at.

The .exe is a single self-contained binary that boots a lightweight tray host. On launch, it requests SeDebugPrivilege and SeProfileSingleProcessPrivilege in one elevated pass, then loads the module registry from an embedded manifest. Each module registers its own capabilities, its own risk tier (safe / elevated / dangerous), and its own trigger conditions. The scheduler listens for idle events via GetLastInputInfo and threshold events from a lightweight polling loop that costs under 1% CPU. When a trim fires, the working-set module iterates the process snapshot, filters through the allowlist, and calls EmptyWorkingSet per PID. Standby purge escalates via NtSetSystemInformation with the memory-list information class. Modified page flush issues a write-back first via FlushFileBuffers on a synthesized handle set, then releases. Every action is written to a rotating CSV log — the Trim Delta Report is generated from that log after each successful trim, and the Session Timeline is just the log rendered as one-liners. Crash recovery is a tiny watchdog thread that re-applies saved priority flags if the process terminates unexpectedly. There's no service, no driver, no elevation persistence — kill the tray, everything reverts.

• Run as Administrator — without it, standby purge silently no-ops
• Set the threshold trigger at 75–80%, not 90% — gives the scheduler headroom
• Add OBS, DAW, and VM processes to the allowlist — you'll thank yourself
• Use Game Mode Watch if you play anything fullscreen; it prevents trim-induced stutter
• Export settings.json and keep it in your dotfiles — the config is portable
• Check the Trim Delta Report once a week; if it suddenly reports 4 GB freed every hour, something has a leak
• Silent mode + Task Scheduler at every logon works better than one giant daily purge
• Don't use Combined Drain more than a few times a day — it's heavy and it makes the next app cold-start slower