Elasticsearch Docker stop seems to ignore SIGKILL

Question

I'm trying to use Elasticsearch in Docker for local dev. While I can find containers that work, when docker stop is sent, the containers hang for the default 10s, then docker forcibly kills the container. My assumption here is that ES is either not on PID 1 or other services prevent it from shutting down immediately.

I'm curious if anyone can expand on this, or explain why this is happening more accurately. I'm running numerous tests and 10s+ to shutdown is just annoying when other containers shutdown after 1-2s.

Answer 1

If you don't want to wait the 10 seconds, you can run a docker kill instead of a docker stop . You can also adjust the timeout on docker stop with the -t option, eg docker stop -t 2 $container_id to only wait 2 seconds instead of the default 10.

As for why it's ignoring the sigkill, that may depend on what image you are running (there's more than one for elasticsearch). However, if pid 1 is a shell like /bin/sh or /bin/bash, it will not pass signals through. If pid 1 is the elasticsearch process, it may ignore the signal, or 10 seconds may not be long enough for it to fully cleanup and shutdown.