Freezing App State on Linux

Published on: Mon May 04 2026

How to freeze apps with kill?

# freeze with STOP, PID is process id
kill -STOP <PID>

# unfreeze
kill -CONT <PID>

How to get PID?

pgrep app_name

or

pidof app_name

What happens?

• process is paused immediately and stops consuming CPU
• RAM is still allocated (system may swap it over time to free RAM for other stuff)
• GPU resources released when the process stops rendering

Limitation:

doesn’t survive reboot, if you shut down, process is gone.

Better usage of kill

I use fish shell, for it I can simply use this command to create aliases:

alias --save freeze='kill -STOP'
alias --save unfreeze='kill -CONT'

Now usage is easier:

freeze (pidof app_name)

unfreeze (pidof app_name)

Persistent freeze:

Haven’t set it up yet