Its important the the different states of the SAP Application server and following application server states.
Initial:
The application server has logged on to the message server. When the server is in this state, it cannot be accessed.
Started
The application server starts the work process and initializes all required services. Requests cannot be processed in this phase.
Active
This is the “normal” state of the application server. It receives and processes requests, and creates and sends requests to other servers.
Passive
The purpose of this state is to “logically” remove from the system a server that has to be stopped during productive operation. The server still processes existing requests, but does not get any new ones. It can then be shut down without any relevant requests such as requests or batch jobs having to be canceled.
The state can be changed to the active state.
Shutdown
The application server is in the shutdown phase, that is, it will be terminated. This state is similar to the passive state, but cannot be changed to the active state. This state or phase ends with the termination of the server.
Soft Shutdown :
To ensure that no requests or data are lost when closing an application server instance (AS instance), we use the soft shutdown function. A soft shutdown waits for transactions to be completed in a specific order. In this order, some states have a timeout, which can be configured with profile parameters. Other states have no timeout. Therefore, it cannot be guaranteed that the soft shutdown will terminate within a certain time span (sum of all timeouts).
We trigger the soft shutdown in transaction SM51. At the start the AS instance has status Active.
Stop
The application server has terminated the connection to the message server and can no longer be accessed.