Quiesce

Quiesce is used to describe pausing or altering the state of running processes on a computer, particularly those that might modify information stored on disk during a backup, in order to guarantee a consistent and usable backup. This generally requires flushing any outstanding writes, see buffering.

In addition, the term "quiesce" is used in telecom applications, whereby callers into a system can finish their call but no new callers are permitted.

Various database and application vendors implement schemes to provide support for this feature including: