Question Using 2 browsers, and they are both taking a very long time to shutdown

[t4d]

Recently, starting 4 or 5 weeks ago, I began noticing that the 2 browsers that I use, Chrome and Edge, do not shutdown immediately (as they used to do). It takes many seconds for the browser to shutdown after I click the "CLOSE" button at the upper right corner. This had never been a problem before. This is very annoying because it often looks like the program failed to respond to the click on the "CLOSE" button.

At first, I thought it might be a problem that I have too many tabs open as I attempt to shutdown the app, but this had never been a problem in the past.

Has anyone else noticed a problem with browser shutdown? No other programs behave this way. Could this be caused somehow by my ISP? I am using Spectrum (Charter) for my internet connection.

All ideas will be helpful, please respond if you can help.

 

[Steltek]

Have you cleared the browser cache on either browser recently? Also, are you running any browser extensions? Extensions can vastly increase the amount of memory a browser uses and can also introduce memory leaks.

Finally, how often do you restart your machine as opposed to simply putting it to sleep?

 

[t4d]

To answer your questions:

1. I have not cleared the cache of either browser, but I had never done that and had not had any issues until recently
2. I am running extensions on Chrome, but not Edge
3. I power off and restart the computer at the very least once per day, but more likely 2, 3 or 4 times per day

I will try to clear the cache of Edge to see if that helps.

 

[Steltek]

You don't necessarily need to clear the site cookies and saved logins (unless you want to), just the browser cache.

 

[t4d]

I tried it, but did not seem to make an improvement

 

[Steltek]

What type of storage are you using for your system drive (i.e. hard drive, SSD, etc) and how full is it? Have you run any diagnostics on it recently? Just to rule out a developing hardware issue...

 

[VirtualLarry]

I used to have that happen, on a Pentium III PC, with an IDE HDD. After much usage, and "many" tabs, Netscape Communicator would suddenly take more than my physical RAM max, and thus, I entered, "paging hell". It didn't help much when Mozilla added code to frob the entire memory heap every time you opened a new tab or closed a tab, because once VM size > physical RAM size, doing so just slowed the entire PC to a crawl. Even attempting to shut down the browser and/or reboot the PC became basically futile. RESET button to the rescue...

I don't remember if I was still running Win9x/98se back then, or if I had moved up to 32-bit Windows XP, actually, I was probably on 2000. But before the era of SSDs, it was hell when you exceeded physical RAM size, and the app was (IMHO, stupidly) frobbing the memory, which just made it WAY worse.

With a modern PC, with a fast CPU, fast and adequate RAM, and especially, a half-decent SSD (even a SATA one, even connected to a SATA2 port), this should largely no longer be an issue, as it only slightly pauses when you exceed your physical RAM, instead of literally starting to GRIND the HDD back-and-forth, back-and-forth, through the pagefile, futilely paging memory into RAM, just to page it back out again to the HDD, as the memory frobbing continued. Meanwhile, the HDD had no free IOPS for opening new programs, or switching to programs that had been in the background for a while, and pre-emptively paged out.

 

[pcslookout]

I used to have that happen, on a Pentium III PC, with an IDE HDD. After much usage, and "many" tabs, Netscape Communicator would suddenly take more than my physical RAM max, and thus, I entered, "paging hell". It didn't help much when Mozilla added code to frob the entire memory heap every time you opened a new tab or closed a tab, because once VM size > physical RAM size, doing so just slowed the entire PC to a crawl. Even attempting to shut down the browser and/or reboot the PC became basically futile. RESET button to the rescue...

I don't remember if I was still running Win9x/98se back then, or if I had moved up to 32-bit Windows XP, actually, I was probably on 2000. But before the era of SSDs, it was hell when you exceeded physical RAM size, and the app was (IMHO, stupidly) frobbing the memory, which just made it WAY worse.

With a modern PC, with a fast CPU, fast and adequate RAM, and especially, a half-decent SSD (even a SATA one, even connected to a SATA2 port), this should largely no longer be an issue, as it only slightly pauses when you exceed your physical RAM, instead of literally starting to GRIND the HDD back-and-forth, back-and-forth, through the pagefile, futilely paging memory into RAM, just to page it back out again to the HDD, as the memory frobbing continued. Meanwhile, the HDD had no free IOPS for opening new programs, or switching to programs that had been in the background for a while, and pre-emptively paged out.

I noticed a NVMe M2 SSD helps too a little more.

Not enough to be worth it to just get one for this though of course. Like you said a SATA one is good enough. Still.

 

[t4d]

As you can see from my signature, hardware should not be the problem. Any ideas about how to troubleshoot this?

 

[Steltek]

How much free space is there on your NVMe boot drive? It also wouldn't hurt to run the Samsung diagnostic software on it to ensure there are no problems.

 

[Chiefcrowe]

First, I would try to create a new browser profile to see if there is a corruption with that.

Otherwise, it could be a windows profile problem so create a new user account on your computer and see if that works...