Stopping EC2 Instance

Question

I had a load balancer die for some unknown reason after being reliable for over 18 months. (instance i-0454bab93c338d6df). I had no SSH access so the only thing I can do is stop/start the instance. WHY DOES IT TAKE SO LONG!? I remember the old days (do I remember this right?) when you could just upgrade the instance size on the fly without a reboot. Now that I'm forced to Stop and then Start (taking everything down in the process) I no longer ever want to upgrade anything - it is too time consuming to make an image, spin up a new server and move traffic to it... So my question is this: Does everyone experience this 10-minute delay when stopping a dead server? Why would it take so long. I ended up doing a "force stop" but still that took minutes to complete. I was about to ask for help here with a stuck instance but as I was typing it finally stopped.

Answer

According to [Troubleshoot stopping your instance](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/TroubleshootingInstancesStopping.html):

```
"If you have stopped your Amazon EBS-backed instance and it appears stuck in the stopping state, there may be an issue with the underlying host computer."
```

I don't remember a time when you could change the instance type of a running instance, you have to go through the stop-change-start cycle.

You can also setup the auto recovery option on your instance, [Recover your instance](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ec2-instance-recover.html)

Stopping EC2 Instance

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