Painless Docker - 2nd Edition

Pausing and Unpausing Containers

Instead of stopping a container, you can also pause it. Pausing a container suspends all processes in the container using the cgroup freezer feature of the Linux kernel. It's useful when you want to temporarily halt a container without stopping it completely.

For example:

# start the container again
docker start my_nginx

# pause the container
docker pause my_nginx

# unpause the container
docker unpause my_nginx

You can verify the status of the container using docker ps