When you use the docker stop command, it attempts a graceful shutdown of the specified container(s). It does so by sending a SIGTERM signal to the main process inside the container. If the container does not comply or complete the shutdown within a grace period (which is 10 seconds by default), then a SIGKILL signal is sent to immediately stop/kill the container.
The grace period timeout is configurable via the --time (or -t shorthand) option. For example, you can allow a graceful shutdown period of 60 seconds in the following way:
docker stop container_name -t 60
Please note that docker stop <container_name> command is synonymous to the new docker container stop <container_name> command. While both work, the latter/newer syntax was introduced to make the commands more verbose, so that the commands are more obvious in what they do.
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