Myth: you should run the daily/weekly/monthly maintenance scripts — via Ben Schwan, heise online

MythNeeds adminmacOS 14 Sonoma and later

For years, Mac 'maintenance' advice was to run sudo periodic daily weekly monthly, or let a utility app do it. Apple stopped relying on these scripts and removed the periodic command entirely in macOS Sequoia. Housekeeping like log cleanup is handled automatically by other parts of macOS.

What to do instead

Nothing to do: macOS looks after its own logs and housekeeping.
If you need your own scheduled job, use a launchd LaunchAgent rather than periodic or cron.

heise reports that macOS 15 removed periodic, that logd now cleans up logs, and that Sonoma had reportedly already stopped using periodic.

Sources

Cleanup scripts: macOS 15 removes "periodic", but no longer needs it — by Ben Schwan, heise online

Source reviewed: 2026-11-02
Link checked: 2026-11-02
Tested hands-on: Not by Oddbyte.Me

Oddbyte.Me hasn't tried this on every macOS version, so keep the undo handy.

periodicmaintenance scriptsonyxcronlaunchdmyth

More in Myths: Skip These

Myth: your Mac needs a 'cleaner' or 'optimizer' app — via The Safe Mac

Myth

Cleaner suites promise a faster Mac by deleting caches, logs and 'junk'. Caches exist to speed things up, so deleting them usually makes things slower until they're rebuilt, and deleting logs makes problems harder to diagnose. A Mac doesn't need routine cleaning.

Myth: turning off Spotlight makes your Mac faster — via Howard Oakley, The Eclectic Light Company

Myth

Old tips say to switch off Spotlight indexing to speed up a Mac. It's a blunt fix that breaks search, and it doesn't work the way people think: switching off the categories in Spotlight settings doesn't actually stop indexing, and Howard Oakley found it can even slow some Finder operations.

Myth: 'RAM cleaner' and memory booster apps speed up your Mac — via Apple Support

Myth

Memory booster apps show a scary 'used RAM' number and 'free' it with one click. But macOS deliberately fills spare RAM with cached files to make things faster. Throwing that cache away just means it has to be rebuilt, and the app itself uses memory and CPU in the background.