Update 2016-01-30: restarting the IO_THREAD might be considered useful in some situations (avoiding MDEV-9138). Look for "in contrast, if the IO thread was also stopped first" in MDEV-6589 for more information.
In a previous post, I listed some sequences of commands that you should not run on a MariaDB slave that is lagging and which is using the GTID protocol. Those are the following (do not