macOs hangs 60% thru boot and takes a long time to boot

I had the following problem and since I didn't see my solution in any of the posts I found (maybe it's there, but I didn't find it), I'm posting the solution in case it is useful to someone.

problem:

macOS14.6, using an SSD for the boot drive with APFS format. Boot up goes fast until the progress bar gets to about 60% then it stops for about 15 minutes before it completes. The screen blinks a few times during the time it was stopped. The system runs normally after boot up.

Solution:

Using disk utility I ran first aid on the boot drive and saw that there were 39 snapshots on the drive!! In terminal using the command "tmutil listlocalsnapshots /" (without the quotes, obviously). I could see that many of the snapshots were months old. Some were from time machine and some, including the old ones, were from carbon copy cloner (back up software).

I backed up the drive and changed the settings in carbon copy cloner so that the next backup deleted the snapshots and so that no more snapshots were created when CCC backed up the drive.

Problem solved. Booting gets to 60% and pauses for a couple of seconds then completes the boot in a few more seconds. Boot is fast even though 24 snapshots are created by time machine. Time machine only keeps the last 24 (one per hour).

I hope this helps someone.