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When I shutdown my computer there is some annoying delay, it takes about 5-10 seconds in 13.10 when in the previous version it was almost instantaneous.

During shutdown I press escape to cancel the splash screen and can see that a big part of the delay is after "Asking all remaining process to terminate...", and then there is "Killing all remaining processes". I have filmed the process with my video camera to check which processes had to be killed, but they didn't chat anything to the terminal.

I previously had this same issue in 11.10, and I resolved it as answered here, however this did not work for me in 13.10.

How to identify the cause of delays in the shutdown process, and fix them?

Community
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wim
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  • Answer to this would be useful for Raspberry Pi users who must ensure shutdown before power off to avoid SD card corruption. An RPi can take up to several minutes to shut down. – tobi delbruck Apr 30 '25 at 14:56

3 Answers3

19

Turn on reporting for misbehaving applications:

  1. Open /etc/init.d/sendsigs in your favourite text editor, with root privileges (e.g sudo vi /etc/init.d/sendsigs or gksu /etc/init.d/sendsigs). Search for the line #report_unkillable and uncomment it (i.e. remove the # tag). Save the file.

  2. Make sure that apport is enabled: Edit the file /etc/default/apport so it reads enabled=1. (If it was enabled=0 then reboot, so apport can start.)

  3. Shutdown.

  4. Upon the next boot apport should come up with a message telling you that there was some kind of problem with a program. That is the one causing the delay. And there should be a crash report in /var/crash . (If apport doesn't report the name, then just look in the crash file, in the end of the file there will be something like Title: MISBEHAVING_PROGRAMNAME does not terminate at computer shutdown)

falconer
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  • I get a report about /sbin/initctl (initctl does not terminate at computer shutdown) – wim Dec 15 '13 at 16:10
  • Here is a bug report (not really usefully informational, but it does show that at least one other person has had this problem and reported it): https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/upstart/+bug/1261177 – Atari911 Dec 15 '13 at 17:33
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    That is my bug report :) – wim Jan 12 '14 at 12:42
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    no /etc/init.d//sendsigs in ubuntu 20.04 ;c – Klesun Oct 03 '21 at 13:12
-1

Is the shutdown always slow or can it vary? If the latter is the case, what did you do before shutting down? Did you do something that took a lot of disk-writes that perhaps need to end first before all processes can be terminated?

you could save a list of all processes before shutting down as per:

ps -A > processes.txt

before you shutdown.

You could take a look at any errors that might have occurred after restart as per:

dmesg |tail

Hope this helps

Frank

frank
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-2

Have you tried this? Open terminal and type

sudo shutdown now

This might help.

Waldir Leoncio
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Habi
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