[gwillen]

I recently discovered a handy use for Chrome's task manager. Sometimes I want Chrome to stop wasting my RAM and CPU temporarily, because I need them for something. But it's annoying to close Chrome, because when it restarts it will try to reload my tabs all at once, thrashing my system.

So instead, I open the Task Manager, select-all, and kill everything. Now I can selectively revive tabs as I need them, and meanwhile my RAM and CPU are free.

(I used to accomplish the same thing with SIGSTOP, but on OS X this seems to have unpleasant side-effects. There's some interaction between GUI apps and the window manager that causes the window manager to start hogging CPU if the app doesn't respond.)