Startup takes longer after Big Sur update...

Finally, having spoken to people at Apple Support (here in Europe) who care and listened carefully at what I was saying in order to help them understand the problem, a Senior Apple engineer took the trouble to inform himself about what was going on with Big Sur and Fusion Drive iMacs, called me back, confirmed that there definitely is a problem that has nothing to do with hardware issues nor with any software that would not behave nicely, but indeed with the combination of Big Sur and Fusion Drives. Those of us who have small SSD blades as part of the Fusion Drive system, will indeed see bootup times of in between 4 to 5 minutes before any app becomes responsive, as described by so many users here and on the Developers forum.

What I am publishing here underneath, is what this Senior Apple engineer told me himself on the phone:

The solution: Wait for an update of Big Sur that will fix the problem. Don't waste time trying to run software that checks if all is OK. Don't waste time re-installing Big Sur. Don't waste time installing Big Sur from scratch (clean install). Nothing that has been tried to fix it in the last four months will fix it. It will have to be fixed from inside Big Sur with an update. Find and read the release notes of every update coming out from now to see if the problem was dealt with.

However: Do know that there is no guarantee that the problem can be fixed!...

This is the Apple response (finally) to our big problem.

I will post this in some other threads that deal with the same problem, as soon as I can.

If you open up Activity Monitor as soon as you can after logon - can you see what's taking the most of the CPU time. After I updated to Big Sur I had a couple of things which were broken and needed fixing. First of all I could logon ok, but any admin functions which prompted for the same password would not accept it. I had to do a full SMC reset which fixed that. Next I had to reset spotlight by excluding the entire drive and then including it all again.

Would it be possible to see the EtreCheck report. I have found that once Big Sur is loaded its quick but startup does pause from time to time. I do have a SSD however. With 40GB Ram it should fly along. With Thunderbolt drives attached my Mac Mini does sometimes beach ball on shutdown. Do you have any peripherals attached during startup which can be removed for a re-test ?

Like yourself I'm a veteran IT professional.

Dave

Update: After uninstalling Wipr boot time was shorter by more or less 40 seconds (I use my smartphone's stop watch). That's some better news on New Year's Eve here in Europe. :-)

Perhaps tomorrow I will try uninstalling all things Google (Chrome and Google Earth Pro, and the keystone files) and see what happens then. But like I said before, someone else here on this thread did that and it didn't make any change.

I wish I could remove all stuff from Adobe also (the Launch Daemons and Agents) but that's not going to happen. I need PhotoShop and Lightroom on a daily basis. Perhaps waiting for updated Adobe software will be worth while. Let's hope so.

For now: Happy New Year!!!

My boot time for my internal SSD (from power on to Desktop appearing) is around 35 seconds with two external SSDs and a Time Machine HD connected and on.

I get a short burst of the progress bar, a pause and dark screen and then a continuance of the progress bar to the end and the Desktop. So what you're seeing is not unusual at all. It was similar to that in Catalina but with the pause further down the progress bar.

What is your boot time? Do you have an SSD, Fusion drive or HD as your boot drive?

Have you run any "cleaning", "optimizing", "speed-up" or anti-virus apps on your Mac? If so which ones?

Download and run Etrecheck. Etrecheck is a diagnostic tool that was developed by one of the most respected users here in the ASC and recommended by Apple Support  to provide a snapshot of the system and help identify the more obvious culprits that can adversely affect a Mac's performance.

Copy the report

and use the Additional Text button to include the report in your reply.

IMPORTANT: ⬇︎ ⬇︎ ⬇︎

Before running Etrecheck assign Full Disk Access to Etrecheck in the Etrecheck's Privacy preference pane so that it can get additional information from the Console and log files for the report:

Also click and read the About info to further permit full disk access.

Then we can examine the report and see if we can determine what might be causing the problem.

Although it's not be a problem for me I know that Google Chrome uses a hidden background task "keystone" to update itself and I have read that some people have had issues with it. You might find removing Chrome and Keystone less than straight forward however. com.google.keystone.

I see you use ChronoSync - which I also use. Might be worth checking thats up to date. I know it can run in the background to sync folders/machines etc.

2020-12-31 18:20:32 Spotlight.app Crash

Executable: /System/Library/CoreServices/Spotlight.app

2020-12-31 17:56:13 OnyX.app Hang

Executable: /Applications/OnyX.app

I don't see any of the usual suspects in the report. However, I do see a Safari extension that includes an app and other files that get installed: Wipr. You might try uninstalling it completely and see if that has any effect on boot time. If it does try a Safari extension that only includes the extension like Ghostery amount others.

Also boot into Safe Mode by booting with the Shift key held down and check there to see if the problem persists.  Reboot normally and test again.

NOTE: Safe Mode boot can take up to 10 minutes as it's doing the following; 

• Verifies your startup disk and attempts to repair directory issues, if needed

• Loads only required kernel extensions (prevents 3rd party kernel/extensions from loading)

• Prevents Startup Items and Login Items from opening automatically

• Disables user-installed fonts 

• Deletes font caches, kernel cache, and other system cache files

Yup. No remedy.

I wiped mine and reinstalled Catalina, fully booted in under 30 seconds. Peripherals and all. I guess it’s just the end of the road for all of us with Fusion drives. Pretty annoying.

Hello there Sapote,

It looks like you have a concern about the time it takes for your Mac to start up in macOS Big Sur. That's always a good thing to look into, and we're glad to see what we can do to help out.

How long does it seem to be taking to start up?

Also, for clarification, are you saying this happens while you have an external drive connected? If you safely eject the external hard drive and disconnect it, does that change anything regarding the startup time or flashing?

Depending on how that goes, you might consider running First Aid on your startup disk and then testing again. Here's how to Repair a storage device in Disk Utility on Mac.

We hope this helps. Reply back here with an update if needed!

Take care.

I believe there is a "verbose" boot mode which lets you see what is happening during startup - might be worth trying - maybe record with camera on phone if it's a bit complex and see if you can see where the pauses are.

https://www.idownloadblog.com/2015/08/17/how-to-boot-your-mac-in-verbose-mode/

Performing clean uninstalls is becoming a bit of a problem these days. For example I tried AdGuard about a week ago and decided to remove it. I used their instructions which included moving the app to the trash and deleting some folders. I then used EntreCheck and found that it had left a kernel extension which required a lot more effort to remove - AdGuard support thanked me when I told them how to get rid of it and update their wiki.

Glad things are improving.

I found this tool useful for finding remnants of programs left after they have been allegedly uninstalled.

https://apps.tempel.org/FindAnyFile/

Always make a full backup before doing anything which might break your machine. Personally I use Carbon Copy Cloner in addition to Time Machine.

Have a better 2021

Dave

I'm answering you although I know you asked the question to someone else. However, what you say also concerns others here on this thread and on this forum.

1. On a less-than-one-year-old iMac 27inch 5K - 40GB RAM - 1TB Fusion Drive (with an SSD blade of a mere 28GB) it takes 3,5 to 4 (four!) minutes between the startup progress bar appearing and any app becoming totally responsive. The login screen appears more than 1 minute 30 seconds after startup. The desktop background (!) appears 2 minutes after startup. The menu bar appears 2m20s after startup. The desktop items (just two...) appear 2m40s after startup. And apps become responsive and react swiftly only after 3m30s - 4 minutes. This would be "acceptable" if we were talking about a computer that is over 10 years old, not one that is less than one year old.
2. The Fusion Drive is 1TB large. The HDD is 1TB, the SSD is 28GB...
3. The HDD rpm speed is 7200. Now even if the HDD rpm would be less, in my own very long experience with both types of drives, the difference in startup time would be minimal (10-15 seconds perhaps) and that difference would certainly not explain the 3,5-4 minutes it takes to boot Bug Sur.

As you clearly prove yourself by citing the boot times of a 3 year old iMac with pure SSD drive, Bug Sur is NOT COMPATIBLE with Fusion Drive systems as it makes the SSD blade choke on booting and loading the Bug, sorry, the Big OS.

And no, before you ask and as you have asked me this before: there are no anti-virus apps or third-party apps that clean, speed up or do whatever nonsense on my system. It's clean, it has only reliable launch daemons and launch agents, and no login items are being loaded by the single user account.

I have reported this to Apple 5 (five!) times, right from the release of 11.0.1 onwards. They reserve the right to be silent, and to censor me.

Signed by a customer of Apple since 15 years, who is thoroughly disappointed about the behaviour of all those who are responsible for the problems he is experiencing with his one year old 27inch 5K iMac. Some of us have given up and accept this unacceptable problem. I will not. I want a full refund or a trade-in.

Hi Sapote,

Thanks for letting us know about First Aid. Reply back here with the results of safe mode once you're able to test.

Cheers.

Run Etrecheck (see my post above) and post the results in your reply.

Hi Dave,

Thank you for your reply.

1. I will try the Activity Monitor tip, but I doubt it will help much in trying to pinpoint the problem, other than that Big Sur is way too "Big" to boot on a Fusion Drive with an SSD of 28GB and a HDD of 1TB. I am afraid the slow boots could be due to the way the new OS is designed to work with internal and external drives, and only plays "nice" on SSD internal ones...
2. After my upgrade in November from Catalina and the update to version 11.1 nothing on my system was broken or needed fixing regarding any software or logons. There were and still are some bugs in the System Preferences, which I also reported in "Feedback" to Apple.
3. I have done the SMC and NVRAM resets a couple of times since the upgrade and the update - they made no difference whatsoever.
4. Spotlight seems to be working fine on my system.
5. The EtreCheck report doesn't show anything unusual (no non-Apple tasks, no suspected third-party launch agents or daemons, no login items that are enabled, except Adobe, Google, and Epson stuff).
6. I don't have an SSD and as an artist my budget won't allow any hardware upgrade or new iMac (I bought this 2019 one in April this year...). My suspicions go towards a kind of inability of Big Sur to handle Fusion Drive systems the way Catalina handled them during boot: fast.
7. The 40GB of RAM in my system only seem to make a difference once the system has completely booted, of course...
8. I have booted up my system with and without any peripherals - the boot times were the same: between 4 to 5 minutes before any application becomes responsive. My peripherals are an Epson XP-900 printer (USB 2), a LaCie 1TB Mobile Drive (USB-C), and a LaCie 1TB d2 Thunderbolt 2 (connected via a Thunderbolt 2 to 3 adapter).
9. I have just allowed Onyx (the Big Sur version 3.9.2) to do all the default maintenance tasks. The initial boot time was longer than before (around 5 minutes) but that's understandable as some caches need to be rebuilt. I suspect the next boot will be again around 4 minutes.

Like I said above, I would love to see a boot log, but Apple engineers seem to find that unnecessary or hide it (for whatever mindful reason...).