What does the JBoss 5 shutdown do?

Question

At a high level, what does JBoss 5's shutdown do? What might go wrong if I just kill the java process instead of gracefully shutting down JBoss?

A graceful JBoss 5 shutdown takes about 6 minutes for my application, which is pretty big and has 305 EJBs. JBoss seems to pause for a long time just before unbinding the EJB LocalHomes from jndi.

Given that, I am considering simply killing the java process. I am wondering about what might go wrong if I do that.

I run JBoss in mostly in *nix, sometimes in Windows.

Answer 1

It releases all you connections such as jndi, jdbc, jms.. It also waits for your classes to finish up what it is doing. It also stops other services such as jms and web console

Answer 2

Killing the process will leave the JBoss files in a potentially inconsistent state, and will certainly leave them in a messy state. When it restarts, it will probably clean up after itself OK, but then again it may not.

On Windows (you didn't say which platform you use), I've seen a killed JBoss process not release locked files properly, and the server won't restart at all. It's pretty rare, though.

In the end, if it works for you, the I wouldn't worry too much about it.