Systemd, by default waits a long time for some services to shutdown when switching off the machine. This can be annoying when you get a message in the console that a stop job is running for a certain service, and it is waiting for it to shutdown. But this can be fixed.
Edit the /etc/systemd/system.conf file with VIM, and then find these two lines.
DefaultTimeoutStartSec=10s DefaultTimeoutStopSec=7s |
Uncomment these lines and edit them to look like they do above. The default timeout defined is 90 seconds, but this is too long. Then run this command as root to save the changes.
sudo systemctl daemon-reload |
This should improve your shutdown time considerably on your Ubuntu machine. I just wish I could get the shutdown messages after booting up again, but I guess, there is no where to save them once you are shutting down and everything is closing down and unmounting. But it would be very useful if you could do that. The old init system in Linux worked faster than this, but at least it can be tweaked.