[gentoo-user] Any utility to forcibly freeze or swap out a specific pid?

[Walter Dnes]

If you run the command...

ps axo %cpu,%mem,pid,cmd | grep -v "^.CPU" | sort -nr | head -n 10

...you'll get a list of processes sorted by cpu and memory consumption.
In my case, I get...

[d531][waltdnes][~] ps axo %cpu,%mem,pid,cmd | grep -v "^.CPU" | sort -nr | head -n 10
43.6 12.4 13976 /home/waltdnes/pm/palemoon/palemoon -new-instance -p slashdot
 1.0  4.2  2650 /usr/bin/X :0 -nosilk -config xorg.conf -auth /home/waltdnes/.serverauth.2629
 0.9  6.8  5278 /home/waltdnes/pm/palemoon/palemoon -new-instance -p palemoon
 0.8  7.0  7127 /home/waltdnes/pm/palemoon/palemoon -new-instance -p dslr
 0.4  5.4 13912 /home/waltdnes/pm/palemoon/palemoon -new-instance -p graphs
 0.1 30.2  4981 /usr/bin/gnumeric worldtemps/netair/danomnick1000.gnumeric
 0.1  4.8  5383 /home/waltdnes/pm/palemoon/palemoon -new-instance -p puppy
 0.0  5.2  6765 /usr/bin/gnumeric /home/waltdnes/worldtemps/solarflux/solarflux.gnumeric
 0.0  2.5  5106 /usr/bin/gnumeric worldtemps/netair/monuah.gnumeric
 0.0  2.5  5075 /usr/bin/gnumeric worldtemps/netair/monrss4.gnumeric

  There are some programs that I would much rather keep open, versus
shutting down and restarting all over again.  But keeping them all open
uses resources, especially on a 10-year-old CORE2 with 3 gigabytes of
RAM (The thing refuses to die).  Is there a way to forcibly swap out or
freeze a specific PID, until I need to get back to it again?

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes@××××××××.org>
I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications