How do I fix extremely slow start and shutdown?

How do I fix extremely slow start and shutdown?

I recall Opera 10.0 and 10.10 shutting down fast and starting fast. Since then Opera has gotten slower and slower on shutdown and startup.

On XP Pro SP2, Opera 10.62 and 11 (but I don't use it much) take three minutes to shut down and use increasing amounts of RAM and CPU while shutting down. It is very irritating as I only shut Opera down when I need to reboot and I don't want to wait three minutes for it to shut down before I can reboot. Then when I restart Opera it used to start very fast. Now it takes several minutes. I am not talking about how long it takes to load the tabs from last session just how long it takes to actually start. As for shutdown, I can't tell when it has actually shut down. I have to open Task Manager and check there. The tray icon remains a LONG time after it has shut down according to Task Manager. (I hate that icon is in the tray in the first place. It shouldn't be there, but if Opera wants the icon there at least it should be reliable as to whether or not Opera is running).

What is it doing during shutdown to take soooo long and use so much CPU and increasing RAM?

Any way to make it fast again for both startup and shutdown? I feel disappointed as one of the things I loved about Opera was how fast it started and shut down compared to Firefox. But now it is sooo slow to do either! Plus, even loading the tabs from the previous session takes way TOO LONG now. I just started Opera 10.0 and it loaded about the same number of tabs that 10.62 loads at start up. Opera 10.0 took less than TEN SECONDS to start and load all the tabs. 10.62 takes several minutes! I just shut down 10.0 and it shut down instantly. That could be because I didn't have it running a long while before shutting it down but I remember when I was using it all the time, and not shutting it down for days at a time, it shut down fast (not instantly but fast).

There was a build some time ago that would log the time it took for the various components of Opera to start and shutdown. I used it and submitted my log, and have heard nothing since then. I don't think the guys at Opera have given this problem a high priority, although I believe a lot of people have this problem. It is quite strange.

In my case something called ecmascript was (is) responsible for the slow shutdown; typically ecmascript uses about 5 minutes to shutdown, and Opera as a whole around 6 minutes. Startup has always been fast on my computers, however.

The slowness of shutdown seems directly related to the time Opera has been open and the amount of usage; if it has been open only for a short time with one or two tabs, shutdown will be fast. If it has been open for days and hundreds of tabs have been opened during this period, the memory usage of Opera will be a lot higher (even if all the tabs have been closed), and shutdown can take up to 10 minutes on my laptop.

+1 , especially for fix for extremely slow Opera shutdown !!!
It's very slow closing now (((

Originally posted by astrogreek:

The slowness of shutdown seems directly related to the time Opera has been open and the amount of usage

Yes, this seems to be the case. I seldom shut it down for many days at a time and it is much slower to shut down then than if I only had it open briefly. But I can have both version 10.0 and 10.62 running at the same time with about the same number of tabs and running for the same number of days and version 10.0 shuts down fast but 10.62 does not and I have not had Unite running on 10.62.

Howto speed up startup:
Find rss and mail folders(Opera/profile/mail), open the accounts.ini, and set all Initial Poll Delay to a higher value than 10, prefferably something like increment of 3-4 on each.
And disable Unite, properly.
If it is still slow, it is weird.

There is NO mail on 10.62 that I am complaining about. Unite ALWAYS starts disabled.

I uninstalled Opera and removed all leftover folders from previous installs, and reinstalled a fresh copy in portable mode. This MAY have improved the situation slightly, but I am not certain. Shutdown is still very, very slow; typically several minutes. I have tried a number of different settings for the memory and disk cache, but the settings do not seem to make much of a difference. I don't have Unite or Link enabled, no RSS, no mail.

feedback:
Lightning fast on startup and shutdown here, doesnt matter how long I have been online or how many tabs I have had open.
Might be clearing disk caches and stuff on another system though.

Did you run the profiling thing they added a while ago?

Originally posted by DuncanWilliams:

feedback:
Lightning fast on startup and shutdown here, doesnt matter how long I have been online or how many tabs I have had open.
Might be clearing disk caches and stuff on another system though.

What are your memory and disk cache settings? What is your hard drive speed (5400 - 7200?)?

settings for Opera are default to start.
64meg ramdisk that is set for Opera cache.

ide hd (7200?)
1.5 gig ram
etc as in sig.

It is no longer slow (at least 10.62 that I use the most is not). I think it was a misbehaving tab. I have considerable misgivings regarding sandboxing tabs but maybe it would be good.

never mind then...

I may have found a solution. I read somewhere that the "Continue from last time" setting could slow down Opera, so I switched it to "Start with Speed Dial". The shutdown was MUCH faster - around 5 seconds as opposed to several minutes before. Then, I switched back to "Continue from last time", and lo and behold, the shut down is still fast! Today, after a couple of days, the shutdown was slightly slower, around 20 seconds, but it is still a massive improvement. Yay!

Must admit I have had Opera set to "Start with Speed Dial" from day one. So havn't experienced other start-up modes.

Originally posted by astrogreek:

so I switched it to "Start with Speed Dial". The shutdown was MUCH faster - around 5 seconds as opposed to several minutes before.

That is interesting. But it won't help me. I hate speed dial. I think that is likely the worst feature I have ever seen in a browser. Iron has it also and I can't figure out how to get rid of it there so I seldom use Iron. At least with Opera, I can get rid of it easily and I can't wait to do that first thing when I get a new Opera version.

But as I said earlier, it appears to be some misbehaving tab if you are using "continue from last time". If you happen to shut down the misbehaving tab during your current browsing session then Opera will shut down fast.

For a balance between speed and preparedness, especially for those who somehow dislike the dials, try this:


First, [Ctrl-F12] and change startup to "home page" or "Speed dial".

Now close the browser, wait, then restart the browser.

Open just a few tabs, with the sites you always want to see.

{Menu->Tabs and Windows->Sessions->Save This Session...}

Name the session.

Mark "[]Show these tabs and windows every time I start Opera".

Click OK.

Click some links, browse around, open new tabs, then restart Opera.

Presto! A quick start, AND the pages you want to see!

Originally posted by astrogreek:

I may have found a solution. I read somewhere that the "Continue from last time" setting could slow down Opera, so I switched it to "Start with Speed Dial". The shutdown was MUCH faster - around 5 seconds as opposed to several minutes before. Then, I switched back to "Continue from last time", and lo and behold, the shut down is still fast! Today, after a couple of days, the shutdown was slightly slower, around 20 seconds, but it is still a massive improvement. Yay!

I celebrated too early. Today, after heavy use of Opera for many days, it needed about 5 minutes to shut down (OK, its better than 15 minutes!). Troubleshooting this issue is a very slow process, because apparently I cannot simulate days of use by quickly opening and closing a few hundred tabs - that always results in a fast shutdown, whereas using the browser for several days and opening and closing the same amount of tabs results in a very slow shutdown. I wonder if it has something to do with files in the cache etc. becoming fragmented... Or perhaps a flash issue... Does anyone have an idea of what "ecmascript" is?

I set my home page as "about:blank". The startup is fast.

if only opera could start superfast and GIVE AN OPTION to use blank or continue from last time.

i have a clean install of opera and everything so far seems to start up superfast on solid state drive. my previous windows installation on 7200 sata drive was fast at first windows install but slowed down to extremely slow. maybe it was my opera coz it would take almost 3-4 minutes to start up. i didnt mind anyway coz i'd rather Continue From Last Time than start with a blank page. i always have over 20 tabs sometimes 60 tabs open but thats ok.

Originally posted by astrogreek:

... Does anyone have an idea of what "ecmascript" is?

It's a standardized scripting language, of which Opera's and others' JavaScripts are dialects. You can see many of the various dialects and other details at the Wiki here: ECMAScript . <i>edited to add: </i><b><u>If</b></u> slow startups/shutdowns are, in fact, connected with Opera's JavaScript, then it could conceivably have something to do with some kind of condition of unintended looping or repetitive time-out waiting for something to happen that never (or rarely) does. Such things can be especially nasty to track down if they're triggered by particular settings or conditions that also involve either specific content or system idiosyncrasies.

Originally posted by astrogreek:

I wonder if it has something to do with files in the cache etc. becoming fragmented... Or perhaps a flash issue.

I have zero cache for Opera (disk and memory) and I have the problem off and on so I don't think that is it. I also do not use Flash on Opera.

I still think it is a misbehaving tab. For this reason, I think sandboxing is needed but I am sure glad am I getting a new computer as soon as the Sandy Bridge chipset problem is fixed as I would not want to use an older computer with a browser that sandboxes each tab.

It was taking from 3 to 5 minutes to shut down and when playing streams from youtube it could still hear it playing though opera was supposedly off. Now it starts way faster and shuts down in around 5 seconds, all I did was change the startup from "continue from last time" to "start with home page"


Opera 11.01
Windows XP sp3

Hmm...I'm wondering if it is better to "save the session" and then use "start with home page" and then load the last session which would be the same as "continuing from last time".

How many sessions can you save in Opera before that bogs Opera down? I haven't been using "save session" so I don't know. I used an extension on Fx for many years that allowed me to save the session and I used to have hundreds of sessions saved. Fx did not start to slow down until well over 100 sessions were saved.