At a high level, what does JBoss 5's shutdown do? What might go wrong if I just kill the java process instead of gracefully shutting down JBoss?
A graceful JBoss 5 shutdown takes about 6 minutes for my application, which is pretty big and has 305 EJBs. JBoss seems to pause for a long time just before unbinding the EJB LocalHomes from jndi.
Given that, I am considering simply killing the java process. I am wondering about what might go wrong if I do that.
I run JBoss in mostly in *nix, sometimes in Windows.
Killing the process will leave the JBoss files in a potentially inconsistent state, and will certainly leave them in a messy state. When it restarts, it will probably clean up after itself OK, but then again it may not.
On Windows (you didn't say which platform you use), I've seen a killed JBoss process not release locked files properly, and the server won't restart at all. It's pretty rare, though.
In the end, if it works for you, the I wouldn't worry too much about it.