I’m building Auto-suspend for TabVitals: an upcoming way to free up Chrome RAM on a schedule, alongside the existing manual X-Ray scanner and tab-sleep controls.
If you work with dozens of tabs, the repetitive part is remembering to revisit them and put the ones you no longer need to sleep. This update is about making that routine automatic, so you can stay focused on your work.
The upcoming workflow
- Choose a repeat interval: 30 minutes, 1 hour or 2 hours.
- Switch Auto-suspend ON. The first scan-and-sleep cycle starts immediately.
- TabVitals scans loaded tabs, sleeps eligible background tabs, and repeats on your schedule.
- A prominent result card shows the measured change in available system memory after the cycle, plus the number of tabs put to sleep.
Tabs stay in the tab bar and reload when you return to them. The manual scanner remains available whenever you want to inspect your session yourself.
Automation needs boundaries
Active tabs, pinned tabs, audio-playing tabs and sites marked Always Awake stay protected. The auto-sleep path also rechecks each candidate before sleeping it, including whether you recently used the tab or its URL changed.
An important implementation detail: reopening the popup must not trigger another cleanup, changing the interval must not cancel an in-progress scan, and OFF must prevent further automatic sleep actions. Those cases are part of our tests.
Save unfinished work and mark sites that need to keep running as Always Awake. The memory card reports the system’s available-memory change after the cycle, rather than presenting it as an exact per-tab measurement.
Manual and one-site tools are staying
TabVitals continues to offer its manual X-Ray scanner, background-tab sleep controls, targeted cache/cookie tools for one website, one-click Incognito, and removal of only one site’s browsing history. Diagnostics run locally. This is for Chrome on both Mac and Windows.
Coming soon: Auto-suspend is in testing, not in the Chrome Web Store release yet. The current manual version is available here:
TabVitals on the Chrome Web Store
Which repeat interval would you choose for a busy browser session — 30 minutes, 1 hour or 2 hours?
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