This was a issue brought up last night ***

Your Linux system is taking too long to shut down? Here are the steps you can take to find out what is causing the delayed shutdown and fix the issue.

I hope you are a tad bit familiar with the sigterm and sigkill concept.

When you shut down your Linux system, it sends the sigterm and politely asks the running processes to stop. Some processes misbehave and they ignore the sigterm and keep on running.

This could cause a delay to the shutdown process as your system will wait for the running processes to stop for a predefined time period. After this time period, it sends the kill signal to force stop all the remaining running processes and shuts down the system.

In fact, in some cases, you would see a message like ‘a stop job is running’ on the black screen.

If your system is taking too long in shutting down, you can do the following:

• Check which process/service is taking too long and if you can remove or reconfigure it to behave properly.
• Change the default waiting period before your system force stops the running processes. [Quick and dirty fix]