Hi,
when shutting down ANY kind of Informix server, a checkpoint makes
sense in order to minimize the startup time later on.
The startup routine will start a recovery process which begins to recover from the latest checkpoint.
This might take significantly longer if the checkpoint is long ago.
That way, you can minimize the downtime by initiating a checkpoint right before the shutdown.
My preferred way to shut down an instance is onmode -ukcy, no matter
what role it has.
This does work also on a secondary instance, even though quiescent mode makes
no real sense on this kind of server.
Best,
Marcus Haarmann