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Software Engineering vocabulary · Release and Maintenance

Graceful shutdown

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

nounCommon term

In software engineering, graceful shutdown means: Stopping a process in a controlled way that stops new work and finishes or safely releases existing work before exit.

In Turkish: düzenli kapanış

How it is used

Used in deployments and service termination. A deadline may still force an exit if ongoing work cannot finish.

Example sentences

  1. During graceful shutdown, the server stopped accepting requests and completed active uploads.

    Existing work is given time to finish after admission of new work stops.

  2. The worker's graceful shutdown returned unfinished jobs to the queue before exiting.

    Safely handing off unfinished work can be preferable to trying to complete everything.

Common collocations

  • initiate graceful shutdown
  • graceful shutdown timeout
  • deployTo put a new version of software onto servers or devices so that it starts running there, for example in a test environment or for real users.
  • queueA data structure where the first item added is the first one taken out (FIFO), like people waiting in line. Also a system that holds tasks or messages until they are processed.

More terms: Release and Maintenance

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