How To: Suspend a process in Mac OSX

We all know how to terminate a process or better yet, how to force terminate it so it don’t bother us no more. Now, how about suspending a process to clear up some memory, then resume it after we are done?

Sounds simple? It is simple. Let’s take example our beloved browser, Firefox, which, in our stress test, extended its arms for additional resources and we don’t want that, at this time.

Ok, it’s time to open the terminal. To suspend Firefox we need to write this:

kilall -STOP firefox-bin

To resume it, the command is:

kilall -CONT firefox-bin

Now, you won’t be able to use it as long as its suspended, but it won’t eat up any system resources. While the suspend function may be a little useless for the common user, it has many uses in a crowded system.