Disconnecting from board taking very long time

I've noticed a strange problem with FG Classic lately, in that it is taking non-GM accounts (even a second instance of FG run on the GM's computer) a very long time (~45 seconds) to disconnect from my campaign. This isn't a problem at the end of a game, since everyone is just quitting the program and it doesn't really matter how long the disconnect takes on the GM's side. But when a player needs to log out and log back in for whatever reason, it can become a real drag, and people always think their FG is crashing or hung up it takes so long. It also makes testing extension functionality and other prep pretty annoying when I have to wait so long between tests.

I've disabled all extensions without any change, so it's not extension related. Sames goes for modules. On the other hand, I tested with a blank campaign, and this time my second FG instance had no problems and disconnected instantly. So something about my main campaign is causing this delay, but I have no idea how to fix it. Does anyone have any suggestions? Does FG have to "unload" any data for players before they can safely disconnect? I think this has only been happening in the last few months, I don't recall having issues like this before.

FG has to save data when exiting. For a player this is into the local campaign cache. But I don't recall it ever taking that long. Can you give us details to try and reproduce?

I would love to, and that's sort of my problem -- what kind of details would be useful here? I do have a fairly large campaign folder, but I make sure to keep the number of shared entries down to a minimum, so I didn't think that would be a factor. I do have a lot of story, item, NPC, encounter, etc entries.

Oh, I noticed my db.xml file is 21mb. With what you said, maybe this is too large, if it is having to save each time a player exits?

21 Mb is astronomically huge. The biggest db file I have is from a campaign which has been running for nearly 2 years and is less than 2Mb. I don't know how much of the db gets saved on the players side but the size of your campaign must be a factor.

Hmm. This campaign started in 2015 so it does have a lot of stuff that's built up over the years. I'm guessing the many story files, plus also I create a ton of custom items and monsters, like having an item entry for each possible spell as a spell scroll. Do you build/use modules for things like items and NPCs? I suppose the first thing I should do is start module-archiving old story content, since that won't be used anymore.

Yes; if I were to do any heavy additions to a campaign then I'd have a creation campaign where all that gets built and then exported to a module for use in the play campaign. However it sounds a bit late for you to be thinking about a creation campaign if it's been going that long.

Okay, well at least now I know what is likely causing these long disconnect times, and I can start slowly archiving bits and pieces to reduce the db.xml size. I'd always given a lot of care to filesizes of images, but never really realized the random created entries would inflate the db file so much! Or that it saves when a player disconnects, and not just when the GM shuts down the board. But knowing these things will help me try to fix this - I archived one chapter and the db.xml file size dropped by 1 mb. Going to be a long process, haha. Thanks for the info!