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How to pause a process on Mac without quitting it

October 2026 • 3 min read

To pause an app on a Mac, find its PID in Activity Monitor and run kill -STOP PID in Terminal. The app freezes and its CPU load drops to zero. To resume it, run kill -CONT PID. Activity Monitor itself has no pause button: it can only quit a process.

How to pause and resume

  1. Find the PID. In Activity Monitor it is in the PID column. Or run pgrep -x Figma in Terminal, using the exact process name.
  2. Pause: kill -STOP 1234.
  3. Check: ps -o stat= -p 1234. The letter T in the output means the process is stopped.
  4. Resume: kill -CONT 1234.

The stop is handled by the kernel, so the app cannot refuse it. While it is paused, its windows do not respond to clicks and do not redraw. Its state stays in memory, and the app continues from the same place. It never resumes on its own: until you send kill -CONT or quit it, it stays frozen. Processes that belong to other users need sudo.

What a pause does to CPU and memory

I tested this on an Apple silicon Mac running macOS 15.7.7, on 2026-10-13.

Load Before the pause After kill -STOP
CPU: a loop that keeps one core busy 100% 0%
Memory: a process holding 1.5 GB (footprint) 1507 MB 1507 MB
Memory: resident part of the same process 882 MB 8 MB

The CPU is freed at once and completely. Memory is more complicated. The footprint, which is the number you see in the Memory column, did not change. The resident part dropped because macOS compressed the frozen pages and moved part of them out of RAM. How much memory is freed depends on how well the data compresses and how loaded the Mac is. I ran one test, and its data compressed well, so on real apps the difference may be smaller.

The author of the Auto Pause utility writes that a pause returns the app's resident memory to the system: in their Chrome test about 4 GB came back. They also say the footprint barely moves, and the system-wide memory gauge may not fall on a loaded Mac.

Conclusion: a pause removes CPU load, from 100% to 0% in the test. If an app takes a lot of memory, quit it or restart it: then all of its memory is freed.

What not to pause

  • System processes. WindowServer draws the interface, and stopping it can freeze the whole screen.
  • Apps during a call or a data transfer. Network connections can time out while the app stands still.
  • Anything that must not be left half-done: writing to disk, a backup. Wait until it finishes.

Pause in Aide

In Aide the Pause button on an app's row does the same, and Resume brings the app back. Pause shows up for apps that load the CPU. For apps that take memory, Restart stands in its place, because a pause does not free memory. A paused row stays in the list until you click Resume, so you cannot forget a frozen app. More on the home page.

FAQ

What is the difference between a pause and quitting? Quitting frees everything, but unsaved work is lost. A pause frees nothing except the CPU, but the app stays in the same state.

Does the app keep its state after a pause? Yes. The state stays in memory, and after kill -CONT the app continues from the same place.

Does Activity Monitor have a pause? No. Apple's guide describes only quitting and force quitting processes (Apple: Activity Monitor User Guide).

Sources

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