# Stopping Snow Owl An orderly shutdown of Snow Owl ensures that Snow Owl has a chance to cleanup and close outstanding resources. For example, an instance that is shutdown in an orderly fashion will initiate an orderly shutdown of the embedded Elasticsearch instance, gracefully close and disconnect connections and perform other related cleanup activities. You can help ensure an orderly shutdown by properly stopping Snow Owl. If you’re running Snow Owl as a service, you can stop Snow Owl via the service management functionality provided by your installation. If you’re running Snow Owl directly, you can stop Snow Owl by sending `Ctrl-C` if you’re running Snow Owl in the console, or by invoking the provided `shutdown` script as follows: ``` $ ./bin/shutdown ``` --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://docs.b2ihealthcare.com/snow-owl/8.x/index-1/stopping.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.