'Shut Down' is sloooooooow

I have noticed this also. My shut down was extremely fast when Snow Leopard came out and has been getting slower since.

I upgrade from Lion to Mountain Lion and now the shut down is about 4-5 times slower, I have a gray screen 'thinking' before a complete shut down.

I do not know what is going on during this time...

Same issue on my mid 2010 13" mac book pro (2.66ghz).

I assumed it was due to the indexing process. (It was still indexing when I shut it down)

Confirm issue on my Macbook Air 2011. This bugs me because the MBA was lightning fast prior to this update.

Lion Shutdown Time: 3 seconds

Mountain Lion Shutdown Time: 13 seconds

MBA Mid-2011

Shutdown on Lion ~ 3 seconds

on Mountain Lion ~ 20 seconds 😟

It quits everything very quickly, but then it keeps on a gray screen for ~15 seconds :S

Besides this issue, the system is blazing fast, Safari is great!

Sometimes it shuts down in 2 seconds, sometimes 20 seconds. Never happened with Snow Leopard 10.6.8 or Lion 10.7.4 both would shut down in about 2 seconds on my SSD.

I have an iMac 3.4 GHz i7 with 8 GB Ram and a SSD, I bought this computer bcause I wanna a quick turn on and a very quick shut down.

With Lion was very fast in both cases, now with mountain lion the shut down take me more thar 4-5 times time than Lion.

I test it turning of the Apple ID of the Users Groups just to try, but it tales the same amount of time.

MBA mid 2011 here, and the same thing happens to me every once in a while. Usually it takes like 2 seconds, but sometimes 10 to 20. Never happened with 10.7.4.

Used to have shutting down problem with lion (mid 2011 MBA) in which my MBA cannot shut down at all. Sometimes I can wait for an hour or so and the grey screen is still there. On good days, it will shut down in seconds. Main reason for me to upgrade to ML is that I thought the shutting down problem could be resolved. It didn't.

After I installed ML, I went ahead to update the firmware for power nap. It requires a restart. And my MBA hangs at the grey screen when it is restarting. Got to use a forced shut down to turn it off. After putting things right, I now noticed that the shutdown speed on ML is very slow. Almost 30 over seconds.

Hope there's a solution for this soon.

Same annoying problem here.

I repaired permissions, reset PRAM, cleaned up the system...and the problem is still there. I was starting a clean installation of ML, but I read this thread and I hope that this will be fixed soon.

It's not the behavior I'd expect from something that it is supposed to "just work"...

One known culprits is Parallels (if you have or ever had that installed). VMWare may also cause similar problems, but the list is endless and its not necessarily going to be the same for everyone. Try to get some clues as to what is causing the slowdown by doing this:

Open Console.app by clicking on Spotlight in the top-right of the screen and typing 'Console', then press 'return.

Look in the sidebar under 'FILES' for 'System Log' and click on it.

Click the 'Clear Display' icon in the taskbar, and then 'Insert Marker'. Make a note of the time on the marker.

Press the power button once to display the shutdown window. Make sure 'Reopen Windows when logging back in' is selected. Shutdown the computer (not 'Restart').

When the computer is off, press the power button again and log in. The Console window should be at the front of your screen. Skim through the messages and look for any obvious hangs or repeated messages.

I am a user of parallels. Hmm. Will try to monitor using the recommended method.

With Parallels, look out for a process called prl_disp_service which can sometimes fail to quit.

If you have problem with prl_disp_service, see the procedure in my post here:

http://applehelpwriter.com/2011/12/24/why-is-my-mac-running-so-hot/

(ToU Disclaimer: this link to my site contains links to other pages that advertise my services as a technical writer)