On 4/19/25 9:50 AM, Jim via tde-users wrote:
It is a beast that takes it's time. My bet is that it takes 10-12sec to write to the internal sqlite database. You can use strace -fp <firefox pid> to see what it is doing (of course you must login on the console outside TDE :-)
I'm not sure what you guys have going on, my firefox (with 40 or 50 open tabs) takes a second or three to shut down.
I just timed it as follows, after using ps to determine that the main firefox process' PID was 24402:
date +%s.%N ; kill -TERM 24402; while ls /proc/24402 > /dev/null 2>&1 ; do ; date +%s.%N ; done
The output was 1745073214.695149607 1745073214.704957548 1745073214.710325927 1745073214.721915419 1745073214.730364874 1745073214.740190648 1745073214.749773235 1745073214.756865326 1745073214.763335939 1745073214.774071905 1745073214.789571122 1745073214.801696883 1745073214.859510512 which I interpret as meaning that firefox took about 0.164360905 seconds to shut down on my computer. (This was shortly after starting it up, I tried another way of timing it after it had been running for days, and in that case it took about 2 second to shut down.)
So what's different between my system and yours? I can think of two possible things.
(1) While I use some TDE programs, I don't use TDE as my desktop environment (I use fvwm3 as my window manager), so maybe there is some long-winded interaction going on between firefox and TDE as firefox shuts down.
(2) I also don't have firefox store my session (and other info) in the "cloud", so that is another possibility of what is taking long. Perhaps one of you with long shutdown times could do an ifconfig -a before starting the shutdown and another ifconfig -a after, to see how much network activity happened. (Of course, shut down anything else likely using much network bandwidth before shutting down firefox.)
Other than that, I don't know. FWIW, my laptop is reasonably fast but not a killer machine (Ryzen 4700U CPU with a NVME "disk"). Running while date +%s.%N ; do ; done from a terminal window shows that loop takes about 0.0047 seconds per iteration, using while date +%s.%N ; do ; done | head -1001 and then dividing the difference between the first and last outputs by 1000. Your mileage will no doubt vary. To avoid scrolling back, try this: while date +%s.%N ; do ; done | (read l ; echo $l ; head -1000 | tail -1) and then do the arithmetic.
I made some progress finding a cause of the delay.
For anybody browsing this thread so others can benefit:
I don't use open tabs as bookmarks. I don't have week long surfing sessions. Anything worthy of preserving gets bookmarked with real bookmarks and tabs get closed. I don't suspend computers to save desktop sessions. I rarely leave tabs open when closing. I am not a news junkie and don't use social media. My Firefox session is empty when I close. I'm a simple user in that respect -- when my day is done everything gets shut down.
I disabled session restore (about:config), enabled MOZ_CRASHREPORTER_DISABLE=1 (don't know if that is still supported), and tested launching with '-safe-mode' to temporarily disable addons. No change in delay.
I tested closing Firefox in KDE and Xfce. Doesn't seem to be DE related -- same delay. I tested launching and one second later closing. No change in delay.
I am adverse to storing my data outside my LAN. No cloud bullshittery here and not a possible cause.
I am zealous about disabling any external service Firefox might be trying to contact and disable all known telemetry. There is nothing for Firefox to contact. The lack of being able to phone home might be causing the delays. I don't think so but need to investigate further.
I am not a complex Firefox user. There just isn't enough user data to update on shutdown. With no open tabs on closing one has to wonder WTF needs to be saved? Nothing, so the cause of the delay is elsewhere.
I thought perhaps there is something corrupted in my profile databases. I long have detested the developers tendency to hide my data in their precious sqlite databases because geek creds. Troubleshooting is so much easier with text files. That rant aside, I don't think that is the cause.
My most recent effort was to log into one of my testing accounts. There I created a new Firefox profile. Closing Firefox saw all processes terminated in less than two seconds.
Next I enabled all of the same addons as my normal accounts. Same quick termination.
When I restored the testing account's previous Firefox profile I again saw about 10 seconds to terminate all processes. I haven't had time to dig further but two things I need to check: custom css files and user.js. I doubt css files play a role but with the custom user.js, who knows what might be confusing the developer's code. Especially since I disable a boat load of nonsense.
For the short term I know the cause of the logout delay. That is a good start. I now have some nominal clues about the cause of the slow process terminations. When I find time I'll report further.