saitenschlager
Level 1 (1 points)

Q: El Capitan boot and login extremely slow

Dear all,

after an update from Mavericks to El Capitan my Macbook 2008 (4 GB ram, 2 GHz Intel core2duo) has become extremely slow. Boot needs about 3-5 minutes, but differs. Additionally, a progress bar comes up under the apple, which I knew from Mavericks only when I started from a sleep image.

After boot, it needs about 1 min until the login window responds to any mouse clicks.

And logging into an account needs additional ~1 min until the menu bar and the dock are visible, after that any mouse clicks are extremely delayed (10-30 sec!) for about 10 min, then it becomes a little bit more fluent. But application starts are still very, very slow. (My coffee consumption rises exponentially since I'm sitting in front of a macbook and nothing happens...)

I worked about 16h now with El Capitan. So it shouldn't be any spotlight problem. I tried a repair with the disk utility, but everything was fine.

History: Worked years with Snow Leopard (fine), jumped over Lion and ML, did a clean install of Mavericks (fine), jumped over Yosemite and updated (not clean, because of M$ office licenses) to El Capitan (not fine).

Does anybody have an idea?

Regards

KB

MacBook, OS X El Capitan (10.11)

Posted on Oct 5, 2015 1:32 AM

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saitenschlager

Q: El Capitan boot and login extremely slow

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  • Helpful answers

  • by mario49,

    mario49 mario49 Oct 5, 2015 10:44 AM in response to saitenschlager
    Community Specialists
    Oct 5, 2015 10:44 AM in response to saitenschlager

    Greetings saitenschlager,

     

    Thanks for the question. If I understand correctly, the computer takes a while to boot to the desktop. I would recommend that you read this article, it may be able to help the issue.

     

    Resolve startup issues and perform disk maintenance with Disk Utility and fsck - Apple Support

     

    Thanks for using Apple Support Communities.
    Take care

  • by JimmyCMPIT,

    JimmyCMPIT JimmyCMPIT Oct 5, 2015 10:50 AM in response to saitenschlager
    Level 5 (7,055 points)
    Mac OS X
    Oct 5, 2015 10:50 AM in response to saitenschlager

    In addition see if you have File Vault enabled. If none of the above procedures provide a solution you may wish to try turning off File Vault to see if it remedies this.

  • by grdh20,

    grdh20 grdh20 Oct 5, 2015 10:56 AM in response to saitenschlager
    Level 1 (43 points)
    Oct 5, 2015 10:56 AM in response to saitenschlager

    I had similar issues. I ended up creating a new user admin acct and that had no lag issues. So then I just deleted my old user account and chose to save the data/home file and then renamed the new account to match the old one and it got rid of most of the lag when I logged back in to this newly revised account.

  • by saitenschlager,

    saitenschlager saitenschlager Oct 5, 2015 11:34 AM in response to grdh20
    Level 1 (1 points)
    Oct 5, 2015 11:34 AM in response to grdh20

    Now, thank you all guys!

    I'm glad that you answered to my question.

    Unfortunately, first 2 hints did not help - I repaired the disk, and I never used FileVault.

    And, yes, I cleared up system startup services, at least from my individual startup items.

    Next I will turn off my antivirus program (avast!), see if this helps. But this should not affect the boot process.

    The 3rd might be an option, but... we are 4 people with 6 (MacBooks, iMacs) and one Mac Pro and a central storage, and everyone takes the computer which is just free, so I would have to copy 4 accounts. Maybe I'll wait a couple of days.

    BTW, I followed another hint and left the macbook a few hours alone, and I think it got better.

    I'll keep you informed!

    Cheers,

    saitenschlager

  • by Old Toad,

    Old Toad Old Toad Oct 5, 2015 11:35 AM in response to saitenschlager
    Level 10 (140,918 points)
    Photos for Mac
    Oct 5, 2015 11:35 AM in response to saitenschlager

    Have you run any "cleaning" or "optimizing" apps on your Mac? Do you have any AV software installed?

    OTsig.png

  • by joszwa,

    joszwa joszwa Oct 5, 2015 3:15 PM in response to mario49
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Oct 5, 2015 3:15 PM in response to mario49

    according to many entries in various forums, EC seems to have a serious problem regarding 'booting'.  Most complains are related to  'hang' in a boot operation.  But complains like mario49 are also heard.      The link mentioned above is not a solution....  sorry.

  • by plaidflannel,

    plaidflannel plaidflannel Feb 13, 2016 9:09 AM in response to saitenschlager
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Feb 13, 2016 9:09 AM in response to saitenschlager

    Although I have not yet found the reasons for the poor performance of El Capitan on my Mac Mini, I have found a workaround that is almost 100% effective.

     

    Early in the boot-up process, the screen displays a gray Apple logo with a narrow gray progress bar below. The progress bar increases in length noticeably for about a minute, but then slows significantly at about the 60%-70% mark. At this point, I press and hold the power button on the back of the computer for five seconds, which causes the computer to shut down. Then I immediately press the power button again to initiate another start-up. I find that it proceeds normally and quickly, and that I no longer get the spinning beachball every few seconds all day long.

     

    I don’t know if it is relevant, by my machine is configured NOT to display a login dialog on start-up.

     

    If you find this workaround to be successful for you, please add a posting here. It may eventually help us diagnose this problem better.

     

    If you have skill in interpreting console messages, I could post messages before and after the forced shutdown. That might also help us diagnose this problem better.

     

    My configuration: Mac Mini, late 2009, 2.6 GHz Core 2 Duo, 4 GB RAM, 500 GB internal disk with 130 GB partition for El Capitan, 1 TB Western Digital FireWire 800 external disk for Time Machine

  • by peacemaster_76,

    peacemaster_76 peacemaster_76 Feb 16, 2016 6:53 AM in response to saitenschlager
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Feb 16, 2016 6:53 AM in response to saitenschlager

    In my case it was resolved by a downgrade to 10.8 After that my computer was fast again (thx Apple)

  • by Helge Pedersen,

    Helge Pedersen Helge Pedersen Sep 11, 2016 4:58 PM in response to saitenschlager
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Sep 11, 2016 4:58 PM in response to saitenschlager

    I have a MacPro early 2008 and had similar issue with extremely slow startup. After resetting the PRAM all is good again.