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Slow booting time

jaggunothing

jaggunothing

macrumors regular
Jul 30, 2008
131
3
Bangalore, India
Followed the advice and did a full format, install and time machine restore. Startup has improved a bit, thanks for that. But no way close to the windows 10 laptop of my better half, wonder what makes them so fast. Spec wife it is same.

Edit: I still have filevault enabled since its work laptop with sensitive data.
 
dreweastmead

dreweastmead

macrumors newbie
Dec 10, 2015
6
1
Glad to see this thread, as I've had slow boot time issues for months now. Had it with Catalina, and now it's worse on BigSur. I have an HDD, iMac late 2015. I've read dozens of articles and done every last one of the "typical" things that are recommended — reset PRAM, NVRAM, SMC, deleted cache & container files, old apps, reduced motion & transparency, removed all login/startup items, glanced at Activity Monitor, etc. Nothing has really helped. When I restart to boot up my iMac, I still get the same "pause" at 25% that others are describing, and it lasts for like ~2 minutes, then BigSur speeds to the end, finally.
 
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honestone33

Suspended
Oct 17, 2019
1,806
808
Kent, WA; about 25 miles south of Seattle
I suspect your internal HDD has a rotational speed of 5400 rpm. Unfortunately, that is slow, and a definite cause for your slowness issues. If you could replace the HDD with an SSD, it would make a world of difference. That's exactly what I did shortly after purchasing my late 2012 Mac Mini about 6 years ago. It came with a 1 slow 5400 rpm TB HDD, and I shortly thereafter replaced the HDD with a Samsung 840 Pro 256 gig SSD (did not need 1 TB of space). What a difference in performance, including up to and including Catalina. And I was able to sell the 1 TB HDD.
 
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Rocko99991

Rocko99991

macrumors 68000
Jul 25, 2017
1,574
2,193
2015 MBP and 2017 MBA, slow boot times. Every new iteration seems to slow the general responsiveness and boot time down. It's added at least 10-15 seconds with Big Sur.
 
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honestone33

Suspended
Oct 17, 2019
1,806
808
Kent, WA; about 25 miles south of Seattle
Rocko99991 said:
2015 MBP and 2017 MBA, slow boot times. Every new iteration seems to slow the general responsiveness and boot time down. It's added at least 10-15 seconds with Big Sur.
Click to expand...
First of all, I assume both of your Macs have SSDs. Yes or no?

Secondly, have you ever done any disk cleanup/maintenance/repairs? You can actually do plenty of disk cleanup on your own (one obvious place to look is your downloads folder; another is the fact that deleted EMails are not permanently removed from your machine unless you take one or two more steps). Also, there are some excellent programs available (both free and commercial) that can help you with those tasks.

Third, do you have any anti-virus software running in the background?

Fourth, how much free space do you have on each internal device? The more, the better.

Finally, if when you upgrade to a new version of the Mac OS, you just do an upgrade "in place" versus a clean, fresh installation, that can cause things to slow down the more and more you just upgrade in place.
 
Rocko99991

Rocko99991

macrumors 68000
Jul 25, 2017
1,574
2,193
honestone33 said:
First of all, I assume both of your Macs have SSDs. Yes or no?

Secondly, have you ever done any disk cleanup/maintenance/repairs? You can actually do plenty of disk cleanup on your own (one obvious place to look is your downloads folder; another is the fact that deleted EMails are not permanently removed from your machine unless you take one or two more steps). Also, there are some excellent programs available (both free and commercial) that can help you with those tasks.

Third, do you have any anti-virus software running in the background?

Fourth, how much free space do you have on each internal device? The more, the better.

Finally, if when you upgrade to a new version of the Mac OS, you just do an upgrade "in place" versus a clean, fresh installation, that can cause things to slow down the more and more you just upgrade in place.
Click to expand...
Yes, all SSDs. No Anti-virus, limited files-75% free space available. Just upgraded, not fresh install.
 
Rocko99991

Rocko99991

macrumors 68000
Jul 25, 2017
1,574
2,193
honestone33 said:
Seems strange. Maybe just doing upgrade after upgrade after upgrade has caught up with you. But there are others who have always just upgraded, and things are fine. I always to a clean, fresh installation of any new Mac OS.
Click to expand...
I have yet to have a new Macos not be slower than it predecessor-mainly in boot up time.
 
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honestone33

Suspended
Oct 17, 2019
1,806
808
Kent, WA; about 25 miles south of Seattle
Actually, you might want to hold off on getting V11.1. Seems folks are having issues with installing it. Look at this thread:

forums.macrumors.com

macOS 11.1 is available

Just got the notification. Since I just finished the first backups on my M1 Air, I'll give it a shot.
forums.macrumors.com forums.macrumors.com

And specifically the last page. I was thinking of doing a clean installation of it onto a partition I have on an external SSD so I could start testing shortly, but will wait.
 
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J

jimdem

macrumors newbie
Dec 14, 2020
3
2
I'm having the same issue on iMac 2017 1TB fusion. Horrible boot times. This is unacceptable. I have a TM backup. Will just reinstalling and restoring fix the issue? Because some others note making boot devices etc. which is a process i'm not willing to follow. It is supposed that such expensive machines "just work" without having to do "hacking". I'm fed up with all the mac os bugs the last years.
 
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IowaLynn

IowaLynn

macrumors 68020
Feb 22, 2015
2,145
589
jimdem said:
I'm having the same issue on iMac 2017 1TB fusion. Horrible boot times. This is unacceptable. I have a TM backup. Will just reinstalling and restoring fix the issue? Because some others note making boot devices etc. which is a process i'm not willing to follow. It is supposed that such expensive machines "just work" without having to do "hacking". I'm fed up with all the mac os bugs the last years.
Click to expand...
Breakup your fusion drive. Use the SSD for system, or if it's small, upgrade to 128GB or larger.

Restoring may be causing an issue. Give a clean install a chance first. We've gotten lazy over the years.
 
Rocko99991

Rocko99991

macrumors 68000
Jul 25, 2017
1,574
2,193
honestone33 said:
Still seems strange, although maybe it is a drawback of Big Sur. Have you upgraded to V11.1, just released?
Click to expand...
Updated to 11.1. Same boot speed. About 32 seconds to login screen. Was in the low 20s with previous iterations.
 
antonrg

antonrg

macrumors 6502
Feb 22, 2019
414
619
Paris
iMac 27" Late 2015 (Fusion drive: SDD+7200 rpm HDD)
Horribly slow at boot up. Up to 3 minutes on 11.01, today updated to 11.1 and it's a bit better (around 2 minutes). BUT COME ON! Clearly they are doing something...
 
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Rocko99991

Rocko99991

macrumors 68000
Jul 25, 2017
1,574
2,193
antonrg said:
iMac 27" Late 2015 (Fusion drive: SDD+7200 rpm HDD)
Horribly slow at boot up. Up to 3 minutes on 11.01, today updated to 11.1 and it's a bit better (around 2 minutes). BUT COME ON! Clearly they are doing something...
Click to expand...
How fast was it on Catalina?
 
H

hagar

macrumors 68020
Jan 19, 2008
2,124
5,417
I did a clean install on my 2015 iMac and startup is still slow as hell. Even after logging in, I need to wait at least 2 minutes before I have a responsive desktop.
 
J

jimdem

macrumors newbie
Dec 14, 2020
3
2
hagar said:
I did a clean install on my 2015 iMac and startup is still slow as hell. Even after logging in, I need to wait at least 2 minutes before I have a responsive desktop.
Click to expand...
Did you restore from Time Machine afterwards? I've also tried clean install, (deleted the volumes from recovery, installed from bootable usb) but i've restored my files manually. The boot time is almost 30-40sec. (iMac 2017 1TB fusion).

When i tried to restore from time machine, the boot times became again slow, more than 2mins to boot. The problem with big sur is that it messes up the profile folder. So if you reinstall and restore your profile from time machine, it will also restore all the problems.
 
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Furka

macrumors regular
Dec 12, 2019
106
50
On my Fusion drive, the SSD is a 27Gb unit, so, when BS is installed, is far more big than this size, and it continues to load on the mechanical HD. If I would run BS on the iMac, I need to change the Fusion Drive for a SSD drive 100%. Now it has Mojave, it takes 17s to boot !
 
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jayyap23

macrumors newbie
Jan 4, 2021
1
0
If you’re using an iMac with a fusion drive, you will have a slow boot up guaranteed! I have a 2019 iMac with i9 and 64gb RAM and fusion drive.

Get a portable SSD and install macOS on your external SSD, it should speed up dramatically. Just did mine now, it went from 5-7 min boot time to just 1 min. Got a SanDisk Extreme Pro, about $100 off Amazon.
 
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hagar

macrumors 68020
Jan 19, 2008
2,124
5,417
jimdem said:
Did you restore from Time Machine afterwards? I've also tried clean install, (deleted the volumes from recovery, installed from bootable usb) but i've restored my files manually. The boot time is almost 30-40sec. (iMac 2017 1TB fusion).

When i tried to restore from time machine, the boot times became again slow, more than 2mins to boot. The problem with big sur is that it messes up the profile folder. So if you reinstall and restore your profile from time machine, it will also restore all the problems.
Click to expand...
No. I did a clean install without restoring anything. At first, I saw a dramatic improvement in boot up time. But now it’s become slow again. I can’t link it to a piece of software either. Besides Office and OneDrive I don’t have any big apps.
 
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