Lion installed but shutdown is much longer now? Ideas?

I too have experienced this same problem with Lion after the install from download. After reinstalling Lion from the Disc that I did burn, start up had improved but shut down still seemed slow with the spinning wheel. My Snow Leopard experienced a similar concern at one point in time after I did an erase of free space. The fix for that was to Run the command in Terminal: sudo chown root:admin / I tried this Yesterday with Lion and it now shuts down in under 8 seconds with no more spinning wheel. This worked for Me.

Found a fix that worked here:

I've had a Huawei USB internet stick installed a year or so ago I don't use any more, but Lion install obviously migrated the obviously not 100% compatible Huawei StartupItems which caused the slow down in my case.

Deleted the following folders: Mac HD/Library/StartupItems/NWNetMgr and /HWPortDetect, password necessary. After a reboot, shutdown went to almost instant (a second or so w/ SSD).

If you know what you do, you might check, and eventually delete (save a copy before deleting in case you need the files again or break something) the entries in Library/StartupItems, /LaunchAgents, /LaunchDaemons, plus the same folders at User/Library and see if it fixes slow shutdown.

See also here: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3194296?start=0&tstart=0

Thank you, jboyzh. I also had the long shutdown problem and, yes, one of the applications I had installed from SL times, was related to Huawei USB modem. When I did Lion clean install and reinstalled all my apps, everything was good with shutdown untill this. But, as it required to install also Java Runtime, I am not sure if the long shutdown was caused by this app itself (and those Library/StartupItems it created) or by Java.

Thanks IrenaB, I've also had to install the most recent Java Runtime in the context of other software. Yet Java doesn't seem to cause shutdown problems any longer without the mentioned, older and possibly incompatible, Huawei modem stick software.

Yes, jboyzh, now it is clear, the long shutdown in my case was related to Huawei USM modem (and Macintosh HD/Library/StartupItems), NOT THE JAVA.

Just einstalled Java again - and the shutdown remains instant. Previously installed Java together with the Huawei Mobile Partner app which required to do - and the shutdown was noticeably prolonged (this caused mis-suspision against Java). Obviously, the long shutdown was not related to Java itself, but to the modem.
Thank you for the reference.

SORRY FOR BLAMING JAVA.

Shutdown time is dramaticly increased in Lion. But,

going from 10.6.7 to 10.6.8 also increased shutdown

dramaticly. This is evident on all ny computers I

installed Lion on.

I've got exactly the same problem with a very slow shutdown. After deleting and uninstalling the Huawei USB drivers (StartUp items and deleted the hw_* folder under /usr/local) the shutdown was very fast again.

Thanks!

I did a clean install of lion and now it shut down in aprox 2 sec 🙂

I tried to remove my Option Icon 505 driver for GSM broadband but it did not help, even some apps but no good...

Clean install was the trick.

..Jorgen

did you use migration assistant for your apps, etc. after doing a full install or did you re-install your apps one-by-one? reason i'm asking, i also did a clean install but used migration assistant for my apps, data, settings afterwards. the shutdown time did improve but it was not 2 seconds like yours. mine takes around 6 to 8 seconds to shutdown. that's good for me but if it can be improved that would be even better. thanks.

I did do a clean install, reinstalled all apps but used mobile me to resync settings etc.

Maybe 2 sec was little bragging but it is less then 5 sec anyway.

I do uncheck the "save windows..." checkbox at shutdown.

My Mac is an MB Pro late 2010 with ssd and 8 gb Ram

.. Jorgen

jboyzh wrote:

If you know what you do, you might check, and eventually delete (save a copy before deleting in case you need the files again or break something) the entries in Library/StartupItems, /LaunchAgents, /LaunchDaemons, plus the same folders at User/Library and see if it fixes slow shutdown.

After deleting some old files from LaunchDeamons, my mini now shut down instantly. Great. I hope this will hold on. I will test it on my Mac pro too.

Paul Muad'dib wrote:

After deleting some old files from LaunchDeamons, my mini now shut down instantly. Great. I hope this will hold on. I will test it on my Mac pro too.

Same on the Mac pro. Shutdown is much faster now. Not so fast as the mini, because of the 4 installed Harddrives.

I had the same problem after upgrading os x snow leopard to os x lion on my mac book air (128gb, 2gb ram). Shutdown prior to the upgrade was 3secs. after upgrading to os x lion, it went up to 13-15secs.

Finally decided to reformat and reinstall my mba today. cleared the os partition, reinstalled os x snow leopard using the usb thumbdrive that came with the mba, updated to 10.6.8 using software update (to get appstore), downloaded and installed os x lion, reinstalled all my apps (including MS office 2011 and restored outlook..etc).

My shutdown now takes 2 secs.

Couldn't take the 13-15secs. which was why i got a mac in the first place.

Hope this helps. Apparently upgrading from a clean os x snow leopard is the way to go.

I've noticed Lion requires many more processes running than snow leopard, so it must just take more time to shut them all down. For instance, according to Activity Monitor, when I would boot snow leopard, and before I launched any apps, i would have approx. 50 processes running. Now there are close to 80. Launch pad, mission control, versions, push notifications, spelling corrector, resume windows -- all these new features require new processes. I think apple is trying to take advantage of users excess resources and run more things in the background to provide a faster, better user experience in the foreground. I've read that if you close an app, it may continue to run that app's processes in the background in case you relauch the app, so that it starts faster, but I haven't seen this in action yet.

I also find it takes longer to sleep when I close the lid.

jhowlin wrote:

.... I've read that if you close an app, it may continue to run that app's processes in the background in case you relauch the app, so that it starts faster, but I haven't seen this in action yet. ...

If you want to see evidence of this, go to Activity Monitor and look for Inactive memory. That's the memory that is held by the OS for apps that you recently shut down. Lion seems to hold onto that memory for a rather long time (maybe that long time is a bug ... I'm not sure), and it can grow to be a fairly large quantity.

If you have a "small" amount of RAM on your system (4GB or less with Lion), that large amount of Inactive memory will slow down the entire system, and it is a major contributor to the battery/fan/temperature issues in Lion that many people have been complaining about here. A large amount of Inactive memory might also contribute to a slow shutdown, although I haven't had time to investigate this possibility.

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