Pause freezes the display, not the acquisition. The producer keeps filling the ring at full rate; the view binds an immutable snapshot of the window that was on screen, and the axis is pinned to it.
Press the pause button in the toolbar, or
Press it again to resume, which rebinds the live ring and puts the window back on the newest data.
Nothing is lost while paused. Because the producer never stops, resuming shows current data with no hole in the history behind it.
The axis is pinned to the snapshot's own stamps, not to the window that was requested. A window reaching back past the oldest retained sample yields a shorter snapshot, and the pinned axis is that shorter span — so you see a narrower view rather than an empty margin.
A paused view is pinned exactly as a held trigger event is: zoom in freely, but a pan or a zoom out is clamped to the snapshot's data.
Pausing is the easiest way to measure a layout or read a cursor precisely, because nothing under the pointer moves between frames.
The status bar says how long you have been paused — wall time, since the stream itself never stopped. It is there so a frozen picture cannot be mistaken for a live one that went quiet.
Pause with a 2 s window over a ring holding 1.4 s: the frozen axis reads
[-1.40 .. 0.00] rather than [-2.00 .. 0.00] with 0.6 s of blank.
The pause probe reports ring_produced still growing across the pause and
event_size non-zero exactly while paused.