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I don’t restart my machine enough for it to be a huge deal, and I know initial releases can have bugs.
but I do hope it’s resolved in the next point update, as I recall a time when they had boot times down to 20s or less, and letting it regress to minute long boots (and terrible choppy UI) isn’t what I would expect from machines in this price bracket.
but I do hope it’s resolved in the next point update, as I recall a time when they had boot times down to 20s or less, and letting it regress to minute long boots (and terrible choppy UI) isn’t what I would expect from machines in this price bracket.
My iMac 2017 is also experiencing slow boots after upgrading to Mojave. I used to be somewhat slow, but now it's annoyingly slow. The correct startup disk is selected in preferences. For me the slow boot is the actual OS booting after I enter my password for FileVault. The delay before the OS loads is slow but it was slow before too. I guess that's the downside of having 40GB of RAM that has to be checked at boot.
I'm planning on doing a clean install once 10.14.1 is out, just because I have had so many issues with High Sierra that I want to start over fresh without any residual problems hiding in configuration files.
I'm planning on doing a clean install once 10.14.1 is out, just because I have had so many issues with High Sierra that I want to start over fresh without any residual problems hiding in configuration files.
Extremely slow boots on a brand-new 2018 6-core MBP and on a 2017 13" 2-core - both run about as long.. Vastly slower than High Sierra, and even after the UI launches, it takes a very long time to settle down and be usable. Many hangs, freezes, and stutters - bouncing apps. Feels like Tiger again. Tried safe booting (which itself took forever), but no joy. I managed to get top running in terminal right after launch (while the stuttering/hangs were still happening), and it looks like kextcache is spiking cpu usage during the freezes, but since both machines lock up just as bad, I suspect it's more fundamental and not a totally overloaded CPU. Once up and settled down it's fine, but rebooting is a hot mess.
I have FV turned on so maybe this is why? Mojave is super fast to restart, but then a PIG after you enter your password. It even switches the screen from the login screen back to the Apple Logo and progress bar! Every single time after I enter my password! UGH! Takes forever! Brand new 2018 i9 MBP!!
I decided to time my iMac boot with a stopwatch today.
iMac 2017, 4.2GHz i7, 40GB RAM, 512GB SSD. FileVault enabled.
From pressing the power button until password dialog: 28 seconds (unchanged).
From password entry to the second the desktop appears (usable state, not fully ready): 2 minutes 40 seconds.
Giving me a total boot time of: 3 minutes 8 seconds.
I never timed High Sierra because I didn't feel the need to, but it was at the desktop in well under a minute.
iMac 2017, 4.2GHz i7, 40GB RAM, 512GB SSD. FileVault enabled.
From pressing the power button until password dialog: 28 seconds (unchanged).
From password entry to the second the desktop appears (usable state, not fully ready): 2 minutes 40 seconds.
Giving me a total boot time of: 3 minutes 8 seconds.
I never timed High Sierra because I didn't feel the need to, but it was at the desktop in well under a minute.
I absolutely agree with this. Some will say it is nonsense, but I also had a slow startup, reported elsewhere in this thread. Could not rebuild as I need my iMac at the office and do not have time to do a fresh install and then still customise everything. After about a week I have noticed that not only the slow startup, but also write speeds, have improved. Its stability is awesome. Then I look around me at my colleagues struggling with their Windows PCs, and I just smile to myself and get on with my work.
This is just a troubleshooting tip which had worked for me on two different MacBooks with SSD drives in the past whenever upgrading to major OS versions. Disable FV; this will take some time to decrypt the entire drive. Afterwards, boot into Recovery Mode and repair drive. Rebuild system caches with ‘kextcache’ command. Determine list of third-party kext files and remove those for reinstallation at a later date. Update your shared cache with ‘update_dyld_shared_cache’ command. Rebuild the Spotlight index, which can take about a day of normal use depending upon storage allocation. If you prefer, then re-enable FV. If needed, then reinstall third-party kext files. In my opinion, FV has been finicky with major OS upgrades, especially with the transition from JHFS+ to APFS in upgrading from OS 10.12 to 10.13. Of course, there is always the clean installation with a complete reformatting of your drive and installing the OS from external media, as opposed to network recovery. If you use a non-conventional method or have a non-factory configured Apple platform for booting the OS, then expect problems when updating/upgrading the OS.
Good advice, but I'm going to do a complete reinstall as soon as 10.14.1 is out. I have had so many issues with High Sierra that I don't want anything left behind from it. I decided to upgrade while waiting for 10.14.1 though.
My plan is pretty much the same as yours with a complete reformat and installation of 10.14.1, along with devices using iOS 12.1, since I've only updated and setup from backups over the course of a few major OS upgrades. I've had multiple minor quirks that I want eliminate any sort of cause by carrying over previous OS configurations. What with the constant OS upgrades to include more iCloud integration, then perhaps this will improve the handling of data for syncing between apps, handoffs, etc. on my different Apple devices.
The trick of going to preferences, unlocking, reassigning the hd as startup, and restarting worked once but after a full shutdown and boot it was back to taking minutes. Ive just reset the PRAM and SMC and it seems its almost like it was easily less than 30 seconds, maybe even less than 20 seconds. If it reverts back to slow boot I will try the reinstall OS from recovery option (not a full drive wipe just reinstall OS).
It seems all related to the new APFS filesystem, I restored Mojave to a HFS+ journaled volume and all slowdowns during boot are vanished ! Down from 4 minutes to... 20 seconds on SSD 
, Mojave now running smoothly like Sierra always did...
, Mojave now running smoothly like Sierra always did...
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It seems all related to the new APFS filesystem, I restored Mojave to a HFS+ journaled volume and all slowdowns during boot are vanished ! Down from 4 minutes to... 20 seconds on SSD
But I had High Sierra boot fast on APFS for over a year. I don’t know if everyone who experience this are using FileVault? It may be a bug connected to APFS, but APFS has worked great for me for over a year.
I do not use Filevault and never had any problem booting my iMac prior to Mojave, using an external Samsung T3 SSD drive. But, from what I understood from experiances from fellow users in other forums, there are indeed issues with APFS and SSD external USB drives with MacOS Mojave, leading to long startup times at boot and even leading to data coruption during use ! Might be something new for Mojave, of course, as I never used High Sierra - because that one never played nice with my iMac 2015... Converting back to HFS+ for Mojave cured all boot time problems for me though !
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Same here with 2016. It is not what I would call slow but it does take 5-10 seconds more than Sierra. I already noticed this behavior in High Sierra. I believe it got worse after the Meltdown patch in 10.13.2. I seriously wish no one had ever discovered that crap. My machine would most likely never have been compromised and yet I lose performance for some hypothetical problem.
P.S. The return to the black Apple screen is normal with FileVault enabled. The drive is totally encrypted until you enter your password. Hopefully Apple fine tunes this process and changes the behavior to what it was before if possible.
I’m sure that they’re receiving tons of feedback about little issues.
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What was strange is that my drive had some errors with the fsroot tree and b tree. I had not been aware of them until Mojave. It may have occurred during the conversion from HFS+ to APFS a year ago. I plan to clean install Mojave after the first or second point release just to start from scratch and ensure that their is no corruption.
So the slow boot is back after the SMC and PRAM reset. If its a problem with APFS that wasn't there with High Sierra then I'm inclined to believe Apple will fix the problem in a future update. May try to reinstall OS when I have time.
I would wait until 10.14.1 comes out. You won't have a different result on 10.14. My drive has been APFS since High Sierra 10.13 and this behavior is not because of APFS.
I thought it may have had something to do with the APFS conversion, as well, but the most noticeable difference I had was turning off FV. These noticeable issues happened to me twice on a MBP mid-2014 DG and current MBP mid-2015 DG. All of the anomalies, but not many, seemed to occur after updating with FV enabled. The most noticeable glitches were when I updated on the mid-2015 from 10.12 to 10.13 which is the JHFS+ to APFS conversion. Either way, it's no coincidence to me that disabling FV and then going through the repairs I've noted before ended up being the solution. Twice I've disabled FV with the problems being resolved and re-enabling didn't have the random glitches to reoccur. Without actually timing it, I did notice boot times and commonly used apps seemed to take a slightly longer time but not a great number of seconds difference and definitely not minutes. So, if anyone has time, then disable FV, perform some OS housekeeping, then after about a day or two; renable FV to determine if the problem returns. I'm curious to know if others can confirm that this appears to be a FV problem which I believe happens during or after OS updates and/or patches.