A memory reclamation method and apparatus, where the method includes determining a target process from a background process list when current available memory of a system is less than a memory threshold, where the background process list includes a process of one or more applications, the target process is a process among the process of the one or more applications meeting a condition that an absolute value of a difference between memory occupied by the process and a memory pressure value is less than a preset threshold, and the memory pressure value is a difference between the memory threshold and the current available memory of the system, and sending a processing instruction to a system kernel to trigger the system kernel to reclaim the memory occupied by the target process.