In his excellent article series, Fred Langa winds up as follows (comments in italics):
I can think of no good reason to keep any of these apps running on your system all the time. In all my tests, at best they took more than they gave; at worse they made my systems slower and less stable.
[Comment: If at their very best they still take more than they give (no argument there Fred), why qualify the recommendation with 'all the time'?]
But I can think of one instance where it might be useful to have a memory optimizer on hand for occasional manual use: It's benefit #1 mentioned above -- the ability to recover memory orphaned after an application's crash.
[Comment: Here we go again! Who is really at fault anyway - the pusher or the junkie?]
The freeware RAMpage memory optimizer, RAMpage, for example, has a command-line-driven 'run once then exit' mode. I've coded the command-line parameters into a batch file, and I now run RAMpage after some other application crashes: RAMpage loads, opens up a hole in RAM, tries to recover 'orphaned' memory left by the crashed app, defrags what's left, and then exits. I'd never leave RAMpage (or any memory optimizer) running all the time due to the problems listed above, and because of the relative rarity of applications crashes. But as a simple, free way to try to clean up after an app does crash (and thus possibly avoiding the need to reboot) it seems to work pretty well.
[Comment: These are Fred's claims, not the claims of the author of the program, and they are all totally untrue. As you shall see, the program makes no attempt whatsoever to recover 'orphaned' memory, and 'defrag' in the context of which Fred speaks is completely irrelevant if not ridiculous. But let's play the game a while.]