macOS Monterey takes 25+ minutes to boot

Hi!

I also have this problem, and I am starting to suspect that there are many factors involved.

I have two iMacs (2017 and 2019) using external NVMEs using USB-C 3.1 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) connection. Both use ORICO cases with JSMicron chipset and a Crucial P1 NVME.

In iMac 2017, everything works beautifully. The system boots in under 30s, and I have a 10 Gbps connection.

In iMac 2019, I see the bug described here. It takes +5 min to boot. However, everything is fine after booting, and the 10 Gbps connection works well. I tried to swap the case to another one using Realtek chipset, I tried to switch to another USB-C 10 Gbps cable, and I also tried to use Apple's USB-C charging cable (iPad). In the latter, the boot process was extremely fast (25s or so). However, the external drive was connected using USB 2 speeds (480 Mbits/s). Hence, it was as slow as my internal Fusion drive.

Finally, this bug seems to be related to the USB3 driver in some configurations.

Another strange fact I observed is that when connecting with the Apple cable (slow speed), the configuration of my external monitor is saved. When I connect using my USB-C 10 Gbps cable (slow boot), I need to configure the external monitors every time I boot the system up.

Update:

Success! After a year of slow restarts/logins following an update to Big Sur from Catalina my iMac (27-inch 5K 2019) w/ 1TB Mac HD Fusion Drive is back to ~30 second startups now with Big Sur. And it only took two days. Basically, after the macos Recovery failure with reinstalling Big Sur, I ended up having to erase the Mac HD again and could only install Mojave , so I decided to install each new update/release after that up to Big Sur.

I think 15 years of updates, new releases, and migrating to new iMacs also contributed to this issue, at least with my situation.

I have spent a lot of time with Apple and third parties on this issue. I was all Apple with no third party involved so no foreign SSD drives or any non Apple equipment. Unfortunately, 4 Apple Genius appointments yielded nothing but Apple managing to upgrade Monterey to the next minor version and the slow problem persisted.

I hesitated to even post again as I’ll be told that I’m wrong, it’s my fault and that I use non Apple products, have buggy antivirus and background cleanup processes and on and on… none of which is the case. But I will tell you what I did.

I decided that I was going back to Catalina. My older Mac Mini was so slow that it was completely useless and my newer Mac Mini was super slow but functioning. In addition, the new Finder interface was so unintuitive that I don’t really even consider it to be usable. Apple would not help with a downgrade, so I decided that it was my project. I decided to attack the project from the worst problem onward, while leaving super slow Monterey running 24 hours a day on a UPS.

The worst problem was that I had virtually no way to get my work done, and almost all of my data was locked in Apple only proprietary encrypted file systems… a big mistake. I did have a Synology so after my final failed Genius appointment I drove directly to Best Buy, purchased a Samsung Galaxy Windows laptop and spent the following 2 months migrating Mac data which had been saved to the Synology to non-Apple external drives with exFAT.

Now having a fully functional Windows laptop with data in industry standard formats I was free to allow non-Apple people to operate on my macs. I had ordered two Crucial 2TB SSD drives, networked around my area starting with some Apple people & found a place that could install them. They installed El Capitan and a Unix Admin friend gave me a trusted link to a Catalina DMG. I learned that restoration from Time Machine was worthless as it created extra accounts and other problems. Had to wipe the drive and start again, and I was charged for that.

After a full month of reinstalling everything I finally had a functional late 2012 Mac Mini running Catalina blazing fast. Now I was ready to attack the 2014 Mac Mini. This time I preserved the fusion drive as it had a super slow, but functioning, Monterey. I’m probably just going to drill it and toss it. Again started with El Capitan and used the Catalina DMG. This time setup was much faster… two weeks, because I had installed tools such as Chronosync and could move massive amounts of data much faster and more reliably.

I now have two screaming fast Intel Mac Minis running Catalina, which was Apple’s last solid macOS release. I will never again allow them to “upgrade” and my Apple world is in containment. I am actively rethinking all of my vendor dependencies and will never again depend upon my Apple devices and will actively avoid any Apple drive formats and in particular Apple Encryption. Apple made it easy to do a lot, but made it very hard to recover from their mistakes.

A fresh install, both on Realtek and JMS controllers, fixes the issue. From there, you can restore from a TM backup with migration assistant, and the bug will go away.

Same problem here… taking 30 minutes to boot up after upgrading to Monterey from Big Sur. I’m using an external 1TB NVMe inside an RTL9210 enclosure. Was never a problem with Big Sur on my Late 2015 i5 iMac

Once eventually loaded it seems ok, so just going to leave it on permanently & let it sleep until a resolution is found.

Have tried reinstalling Monterey & clearing SMC & PRAM, but no difference. Looking at the verbose mode output, it seems to be doing lots of tx_enter, tx_flush, tx_leave operations which are taking ages.

Apple’s MacOS upgrades are always very aggressive, which is why a lot of people wait months for fixes to be released. I foolishly upgraded thinking Apple might have got it right this time. Should know better 🙄

Yep sounds like an external drive issue then. It also seems slow when running Monterey, like it has a big problem with booting & running via external drive. Was fine with Big Sur.

Just hold Cmd+V on startup and you’ll see the output log. You may have to take a screenshot or record it with your phone to read it properly, as it scrolls off the screen.

It’s been tough going recently… Had no end of problems with the Developer Transition Kit too.

Thankfully have another Mac with Big Sur I can use for development. Fingers crossed they release a fix for Monterey soon🤞

Why are you using sophos antivirus mac os needs none , this is probably why your mac is slow, is anyone else in this thread using antivirus 3rd party , as if so try removing that and see if it still happens. for the person using it , you don't need that on mac os , only thing ever recommended is Malwarebytes free and i see that very rarely come up in threads as well.

My Intel based Mac Minis wouldn’t update, so I purchased an M1 MacBook Air. I spent 5 solid days with Apple Tech Support and Apple could not get keychain on the MBP to turn on. Maddeningly the Rep leaves you and calls back every few hours so it takes 5 days to work with Apple for 5 hours. So I returned it. I took one to Apple Genius support and they kept it overnight and did get it to upgrade to the second version of Monterey, which was every bit as slow and unusable as the first Monterey.

I had a third Apple Genius appointment to downgrade the machines back to Big Sur or Catalina. It turned out that Apple will not do that, despite what the Apple call center rep promised. I’m very disappointed in Apple. Dead in the water, I had to buy an emergency Samsung Windows laptop which I had never thought that I would ever do. To my surprise it was a whole lot snappier and faster than either of my Mac Minis had ever been.

With no credible path forward and no access to most of my Mac backups (external drives with proprietary Apple encryption with keys in Keychain), I was facing what turned out to be a 4 month effort to get back to being my old organized self. I use a Synology DS411 RAID with Time Machine enabled, but that does no good without an Apple Mac with Keychain. Thankfully I had the foresight to also make backups to the Synology Time Machine (or any backupS. I never lost data I sure did have a devil of a time weeding through 8 TB to find the data of record.

The moment hat I had a Windows laptop installed with the basics and could again work I decided to rebuild the two Mac Minis. First step was to buy two 2TB SSD drives from Crucial. I searched for a local tech company who could replace the old drives and install Catalina, the last stable macOS that I had run. I hadn’t cared for Big Sur as Finder became hopelessly Byzantine with that release.

So now In my 5th month of recovery, I do have two working 2TB SSD Mac Minis with 16 GB RAM. I have ChronoSync backing up between the Mac Minis and to the Synology RAID array and also the Synology based Time Machine service.

I am NOT going to back up Apple encrypted external drives as I learned the hard way that when Apple breaks, your Apple encrypted external drive backups are inaccessible. I also learned that you cannot even reformat these external drives with your Mac. But it turns out that good old Windows on a laptop can, so I have formatted them to NTFS file systems.

I will keep these Macs (with their Parallels Windows VMs), but all of my backups will be going to industry standard formats. I will never go to M1 machines and I will only use industry standard file systems and encryption. I am probably also going to move towards Windows laptops with Virtual Box or VMWare. I will never again find myself trapped by Vendor lock-in.

TakomaFan wrote:

Monterey is clearly slowed down on Intel Macs due to the Intel emulation layer.  This version should never have been released on the Intel based Macs and there is no way that this could ever have been seriously tested.  

That's not true. Monterey is about the fastest system I've had on my 2017 Intel iMac. Most of the reasons for slow performance are junk ware, i.e. anti-virus, cleaning, etc. apps, that the user has installed or the face that the model purchased by the user was the slowest offered by Apple at the time of purchase: 8 GB of RAM and 5400 rpm hard drive.

Similar problem in MacPro 2013, with external 1TB SSD for storage of one of the user folders.

In my case, it takes 5 min to show desktop files "after" login.

Removing external SSD and logging in other users seems OK.

So I checked this external SSD with disk first aid. It took 5 min to finish, because it spent 4 min on trimming unused blocks steps.

Does Monterey check external devices every time after rebooting?

For what it's worth, I'm also trying out a new 2020 iMac. I restored from Time Machine when I bought it. Boot up times are really fast. Of course, the 2020 has an internal SSD drive... but the Fusion drive did not take 10 minutes to boot until just a few weeks ago.

There seems to be some kind of a software issue going on because I can hear the Fusion drive working for 10-15 minutes after boot while sitting "idle". So, I'm reindexing Spotlight now to see if that helps.

It is clear that the problem is related to a combination of factors — even the type of the computer matters. In my case, I can see it in an iMac 2019, but not in an iMac 2017. It is also clear that it has something to do with the USB3 driver since connecting the external SSD using a USB2 cable (like an Apple charger cable) leads to a minimal boot time but, of course, a very slow system.

In my opinion, there is nothing we can do except try to exchange the SSD manufacturer. Hence, I highly suggest that everyone who has this issue submit a bug to Apple and link this thread.

If this is being caused by the Samsung trim bug that's in some controller chips, formatting and reinstalling macOS will help, but not for long. Garage will bulid up and the system will get increasingly slow again.