Big Sur running slow

[david-miller]

Big Sur seems to have really slowed down my system in general, particularly start up times to app launch time, is anyone else having this issue?

Running on a mid 2015 macbook air i7, 8GB ram. It's got an M.2 NVME SSD but I can't see why that would be a problem.

 

[Airsculpture]

2017 iMac with 8GB RAM

Seems just as zippy as Catalina for me. I was/am running both on two separate external SSD drives and apart from graphic ugliness in spots, speed seems comparable.

 

[IowaLynn]

Big Sur seems to have really slowed down my system in general, particularly start up times to app launch time, is anyone else having this issue?

Running on a mid 2015 macbook air i7, 8GB ram. It's got an M.2 NVME SSD but I can't see why that would be a problem.

Booting and launching apps s.u.c.* and this 2020 Mini i5/16/512 - 2200MB/sec

Common complaint . Just to test, installed Windows and booting and launching are super fast, nearly instant.

 

[SmOgER]

Booting sucks but that's nothing new. App launch is fine for me though.

 

[jazz1]

My late 2015 i5 iMac with two external monitors is very, very slow upon wake from sleep. Also, if I had apps. open in the outboard monitors the Mac tends to open them up on the iMacs screen, not the external monitors where they were placed upon sleep. This all happens if I put the iMac to sleep, or it times out to sleep.

 

[rhsauer]

My iMac (2019 version, Fusion Drive) is also much slower to boot than it was under Catalina. Big Sur also boots faster on my 2015 12” Macbook. I’m debating doing a fresh install.

 

[Furka]

My iMac (2019 version, Fusion Drive) is also much slower to boot than it was under Catalina. Big Sur also boots faster on my 2015 12” Macbook. I’m debating doing a fresh install.

The problem is the Fusion drive in my experience. I have installed a fresh install from BS, and the boot time is unbeliveable: 1 minute 50 seconds. Catalina performs the boot in 17 seconds. No way for me, to upgrade actually. If the new 11.1 comes I will try again, but I think the problem is with the HD. I hear the mecanical HD from the Fusion on boot in BS, while in Catalina I do no hear nothing.

The other option is to change the Fusion drive to a good SSD drive.

 

[rhsauer]

Fwiw, I wiped my hard drive and reinstalled Big Sur and my applications and the book time is back to normal. (It’s about 45 seconds from power on to working desktop.).

 

[SmOgER]

Fwiw, I wiped my hard drive and reinstalled Big Sur and my applications and the book time is back to normal. (It’s about 45 seconds from power on to working desktop.).

Hmm.. Mine without reinstall is around 60sec. With your reinstall 45sec that's still very slow compared to Win10. This kind of sucks. It boots like win would with ancient HDD.
At least the app launch is fast then (unlike with HDD lol).

 

[Isamilis]

I also had same issues. Even opening Safari took 15-20 seconds. Very unacceptable. Tried to install from scratch and downgrade to Catalina. MacBook Air 2019 i5.

 

[fivenotrump]

-ly

 

[Isamilis]

I also had same issues. Even opening Safari took 15-20 seconds. Very unacceptable. Tried to install from scratch and downgrade to Catalina. MacBook Air 2019 i5.

Just to update. Finally I end up with solution below:
- Uninstall Lulu firewall. I am not sure whether this is the culprit but I found some users have issues with Big Sur
- reboot to recovery mode, run disk utility and check volume (which found no errors)
- rebuild spotlight database

Now, the performace is back to normal (just like before upgrade).

 

[Rocko99991]

I also had same issues. Even opening Safari took 15-20 seconds. Very unacceptable. Tried to install from scratch and downgrade to Catalina. MacBook Air 2019 i5.

It's slow on my 2017 MBA also. Just a more cumbersome OS it seems. I am going back to Catalina as well.

 

[RangerOne]

I did a CLEAN install of Big Sur on 5 different machines, and upgrades on 3 others.

My experience is that booting and app launch time is indeed slower. It feels like Apple put all their efforts into M1 app launch times to the detriment of Intel Macs.

Another thing I noticed is that network operations (file sharing and screen sharing) take longer to engage and seem to be much slower. I just tried transferring 250 files from a machine and after a few minutes it was still "preparing." This was 10 feet from the 802.11ac WiFi router. The same happens on Ethernet. When other transfers started to move, it seemed like the progress bar was very slow to update and it kind of jerks its way across to completion and takes much longer than normal. And this is with a 2019 MacBook Pro 16. This is ridiculous. I see the new OS update was released today, so I am about to try it to see if it helps any.

 

[jm31828]

I just installed the 11.2.1 update a few days ago hoping it would fix whatever was causing the horrible slowness- no improvement at all. Why are Apple not addressing this in these updates?

 

[boswald]

I installed a fresh copy of Big Sur on my Mac mini and it's stable, but animations feel a little choppy/sluggish. I don't really notice until I force myself to see them, though. I guess it's to be expected from a 2018 Intel-based Mac.

 

[Capeto]

Big Sur is also pretty slow on my Early 2015 13" MBP (2.7GHz dual-core i5, 8GB RAM); battery life also seems to have taken a hit. I understand that new features are added with every major OS release that may impact performance, but the jump from Catalina to Big Sur has been the one with the most performance impact in the 6 years I've had this computer, by far. I'm really considering downgrading and going back to Catalina.

I have an early 2020 i5 MBA that I use for work that I've kept on Catalina precisely because of this.