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.)
In the comments on the blog, Jared added the following:
"If you can still use the Chrome UI during the slowdown, there is a built in Task Manager, under the Tools menu, that shows you all of the above stats and the page title."
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.)