Signals are a POSIX inter-process communications mechanism. If you are using Windows then this documentation does not apply.
Zope responds to signals which are sent to the process id specified in the file ‘$INSTANCE_HOME/var/Z2.pid’:
SIGHUP - close open database connections, then restart the server
process. A idiom for restarting a Zope server is:
kill -HUP `cat $INSTANCE_HOME/var/z2.pid`
SIGTERM - close open database connections then shut down. A common
idiom for shutting down Zope is:
kill -TERM `cat $INSTANCE_HOME/var/Z2.pid`
SIGINT - same as SIGTERM
SIGUSR1 - dump a stack trace of all threads to stdout. This can help
diagnosing `stuck` Zope processes if all threads are stuck.
SIGUSR2 - close and re-open all Zope log files (z2.log, event log,
detailed log.) A common idiom after rotating Zope log files
is:
kill -USR2 `cat $INSTANCE_HOME/var/z2.pid`