The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) is currently evaluating a proposal to optimize the shutdown and restart speed of Fedora – a downstream configuration change to reduce the systemd unit timeout from 2 minutes to 15 seconds.

According to reports, when Fedora is currently restarting or shutting down, some services that cannot be stopped during shutdown will cause this process to take up to 2 minutes. Red Hat engineers and the Fedora Workstation Working Group believe that reducing 2 minutes to 15 seconds is sufficient for the maximum time a service needs to be down. However, for running services that may take more time to shut down properly and cleanly, such as some servers, the value is still configurable.

According to the developer, forcing the service to stop after 15 seconds does not cause any problems on typical systems. However, system administrators may need to configure higher timeouts if the wait time is longer for specific services, such as database services.

systemd made an effort to shorten the timeout upstream, but that work stalled in the last year. So now Red Hat is pushing forward with changes to Fedora, pending approval from FESCo.

The main benefit of this change is that it alleviates a very annoying and embarrassing problem: users don’t need to sit and wait for their machines to shut down. It will also encourage users to use the built-in shutdown API properly.

More content view: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Shorter_Shutdown_Timer