If you run maintenance or backup scripts at night, your Mac can always be set to shut down after these. Once the number of swap files exceeds five or so, your Mac starts to slow down. MacOS uses swap files, spaces on your hard disk that allow your Mac to pretend it has more RAM than it actually has, for virtual memory. The disadvantages of waiting for a minute (possibly less) while your Mac starts up will no doubt be outweighed by the speed improvements if you’re marginal on RAM. Back in the days of slow hard drives starting up your Mac again might have been something you did while making a cup of tea, but modern Macs are much faster to start up. The main advantage of sleeping your Mac is to be able to continue where you left off quickly. The old argument of leaving a computer on as much as possible was based on the wear and tear of restarting the hard drive, but the restart argument rests on more than just this. Few aspects of Macs cause more arguments than the one about what to do at the end of the day: shut down or sleep? We address that here: Should I shut down my Mac every night? In fact that is why we recommend that you do restart regularly. But restarting is usually the first fix for any Mac that’s slowed right down. However, we understand that there will be lots of reasons why you don’t want to do that – perhaps you don’t want to stop what you are doing and wait while your Mac restarts and the app you were using is reloaded. One of the most obvious things you can do if your Mac has slowed down is restart it.

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