Memory: keep apps alive without buying RAM

Pause idle apps with one command. Reclaim 1–4 GB of RAM. Wake any app instantly with a click. macOS + Linux today.

What it does

Your computer probably has 8 or 16 GB of RAM, and most of it is held hostage by apps you're not actively using: Slack, Spotify, Mail, Notion, half-a-dozen Electron tools quietly sitting at 200–400 MB each. CelDrive's memory hibernation pauses apps that have been idle long enough that you wouldn't notice, freeing the OS to compress and page out their working set.

Under the hood it's POSIX SIGSTOP / SIGCONT: a stable, standard mechanism that's been in Unix for forty years. (One sentence honesty for technical readers; non-technical readers can skip.) When you click an app to bring it back, it gets SIGCONT and resumes in milliseconds. No state lost. No reload. No "your session expired."

Less RAM pressure also means less swap thrashing, lower fan, less battery drain, and noticeably more headroom for the things you are using: typically another 20–40 browser tabs before the system starts feeling sluggish.

Honest framing: "1–4 GB, not 4×"

You'll see other tools market this category with lines like "16 GB feels like 64 GB." That's overstated. Here's what hibernation actually delivers, in our own measurements and on real laptops:

• 1–4 GB of RAM reclaimed in a typical session with idle Slack, Spotify, Mail, Notion, etc. paused.
• Noticeably less fan and battery drain. Paused apps stop running their event loops and websocket pings.
• Longer browser tab counts before the system gets sluggish. The recovered RAM directly extends what Chrome / Firefox / Safari can hold.

What it does not do: turn 16 GB into 64 GB, replace a hardware upgrade for genuinely memory-hungry workloads (video editing in 8K, large model fine-tuning), or help when your foreground app is the one eating all the RAM. We'd rather under-promise and let you measure the real lift on your machine than ship a marketing line that sets you up for disappointment.

Safety rails

Pausing the wrong process is the failure mode that breaks user trust. The hibernator ships with a conservative default skip list and refuses to pause:

• Foreground apps: whatever window is focused right now, plus anything focused in the last few minutes
• System processes: anything with PID < 100 or owned by root, kernel threads, launchd / systemd children
• Terminals: Terminal.app, iTerm, Alacritty, Kitty, gnome-terminal, anything running an interactive shell
• Audio apps: Spotify, Music, anything currently playing audio (CoreAudio / PulseAudio / PipeWire query)
• Anything with a listening TCP socket: servers, sync clients, dev environments. Pausing these breaks connections

The default skip list ships with sensible exclusions for the apps people most regret pausing (Spotify mid-song, Zoom mid-call, Docker Desktop). You can override per-app in either direction:

Skip means "never pause this app." Keep means "if this app is paused for any reason, wake it back up." Most users never touch these (the defaults work fine) but they're there for when you have an idiosyncratic workflow.

One command to enable

Hibernation is opt-in. Run the command, the daemon installs itself, and idle apps start pausing 30 minutes after their last input.

If you'd rather not use the terminal, the dashboard has the same toggle. Open the CelDrive app → Memory → flip Hibernation on. The dashboard also shows the live list of paused apps with one-click wake.

Platform support

If you're on Wayland and want the full experience, set up explicit hibernation rules per app (celdrive swap rule add <app> --idle 30m) and the daemon will pause those processes after the configured idle window. The trade-off is intentional: we'd rather skip an obscure app than pause your video call.