Ventura finder- No Dock or CmdTab for ~1min after restart

I have a late 2019 iMac. I recently updated from Monterey 12.6.3 to Ventura 13.2. After doing so, my dock would take a very long time to show up and sometimes it wouldn't show up at all. The Finder was also very sluggish. I went into System Settings and fiddled with the dock's settings. It didn't help.

I noticed that doing anything with my network volumes was giving me beach balls for a bit before finally working. On a hunch, I decided to remove anything from the dock or the Finder window sidebar that had anything to do with a network volume. I did that and rebooted. Voila. the dock appear immediately no more Finder sluggishness.

I don't know if you have any network volumes in your dock and/or Finder window sidebars, but if you do, try removing them and see if that helps.

Some additional info for what it's worth:

My network volumes are mostly pointed to a Synology NAS. I was connected to that NAS using AFP because I wanted to be able to to Spotlight searches and I think Spotlight searches were not supported using SMB until Ventura. I recreated all of my network volumes using SMB instead of AFP. Everything including Spotlight searches worked fine and I noticed a significant improvement in performance. I put all those new SMB volumes in my dock and in the Finder sidebar and everything has been working just fine ever since.

WIth all due respect, I think James Brickley's diagnosis about RAM causing the problems with your dock is a red herring. Problematic RAM can indeed cause a variety of problems, but I think the notion that memory modules would somehow suddenly zero in specifically on dock functionality while everything else is working fine just isn't plausible. I suspect you did what I did. I bought my iMac with 8GB of RAM and then went out and purchased two reasonably priced name brand 32GB modules and installed them in the two empty slots. I'm at 72GB of RAM as well. Never had any problems. I found this thread while troubleshooting and decided that since I've been running my hardware in this configuration for 3½ years, the likelihood that all of a sudden I would have Dock problem because of it...... Possible? I suppose. Probable, uhh no.

Here's my RAM config:

It could be software you have installed. You can download the free EtreCheck software, be sure to enable Full Disk Access. Run a scan, click the share arrow and copy the report. Then reply to this thread, click the Additional Text button give it a title and paste the report in the body of the additional text. We can review what you have running and determine if any of it might be the problem.

Or you might have some bad RAM. 72GB of RAM is an unusual configuration. Did you upgrade the RAM yourself?

There are four SO-DIMM slots so it sounds like you have two SO-DIMMS of one size and two of another size. Mismatching RAM sizes or placing in the wrong slot can be problematic. You should ensure SO-DIMM banks are aligned as below. Ideally it's better if you had all 4 matching RAM SO-DIMMS. Even if you have newer faster RAM SO-DIMMS the older slower RAM might be hindering your system performance. The RAM moves as slow as the slowest SO-DIMM installed.

BANK 0 / Channel A - DIMM 0 - 4GB
BANK 1 / Channel A - DIMM 1 - 32GB
BANK 2 / Channel B - DIMM 0 - 4GB
BANK 3 / Channel B - DIMM 1 - 32GB

Best performance is when BANK 0 matches BANK 2, and BANK 1 matches BANK 3.

You can try removing the 2 4GB RAM SO-DIMMS as well as the two 32GB SO-DIMMS and reboot a few times see if the lag goes away.

You can create a bootable USB flash drive 16GB+ and hold Option while powering on to boot from the installer USB flash drive and then run Disk Utility on the internal SSD. Run First Aid on each APFS volume then the container then the SSD at the top of the tree. Make sure you go to View and Show All Devices so you can see everything in the sidebar.

Create a bootable installer for macOS - Apple Support

The original poster found a corrupted dock config file. You found slow network shares. The original posters RAM config is unusual and not optimal for performance. I merely commented that it’s not a recommended memory configuration. All scenarios are still true.

There’s a thousand possibilities. The idea of a silver bullet solution is the real red herring. Your tone came across quite malevolent. I won’t respond in kind.