Sometimes we want to suspend a process execution. While for those which are running in foreground in terminal, we can use CTRL + Z shortcut, what about processes that run in the background? For instance, how we can stop a deamon process?

Fortunately, there is a special Unix signal called SIGSTOP. When this signal is sent to the running process, kernel will suspend the given process, which will stay suspended till the SIGCONT signal will be sent.

This is how it look like from the command line:

# suspend
kill -STOP PID

# resume
kill -CONT PID

I can imagine one situation when this feature can be useful. Let’s suppose, there is PHP application which utilises MySQL database. When we want to test how the application will behave when database will stop responding, we can just send SIGSTOP to MySQL process. Despite sending this signal, all of the connections between those two will be preserved. This would be a similar situation of what happens when we experience heavy load on our machines.