Yes, your process shouldn't eat data on a kill -9. At the same time, in a lot of applications, kill -9 can make other things less convenient. If your app is in

Yes, your process shouldn't eat data on a kill -9. At the same time, in a lot of applications, kill -9 can make other things less convenient. If your app is in a cluster, that job you just kill -9'ed is now suddenly not sending out heartbeat messages, which means the servers around it are waiting, with data stacking up, wondering what happened to that process you just shot in the head. Yes, it'll recover when things come back up, but you've just added more work on the other servers. Or, that server task didn't write the last few log entries. Given you're killing jobs, those stragglers may have data as to why you needed to stop things in the first place. In short, you shouldn't kill -9 right away because well-written programs talk about their state to the programs and log files around it, and those last messages can be very useful in giving information as to what is happening with your program.