Solution: Mountain Lion slow shut down

I tried this and I get:

No matching processes belonging to you were found

for the last entry

I have a 13" MacBook Pro mid 2012 with 10.8.2.

Added a Samsung 830 SSD (256GB) and 16GB of DDR3 (1600) RAM.

Since the .2 update, shutdown slowdown has dogged it.

It's case significant, 'killall Dock' is what you need.

The fix for me was to close all running applications then tick the box to re-open windows when logging back in (I had it un-ticked before).

The shut down went from >20 seconds to about 1 second! (I have an SSD installed in my iMac.)

Now whether this stays fixed is another matter!

It should be "killall Dock" - capital "D"

The solution in the original post

rm ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.desktop.plist

killall Dock

worked perfectly for me. Shutdown time had gone to 25 seconds after the upgrade to Mountain Lion (OSX 10.8), and after this little procedure it is back where it belongs: 1 second. Thanks for saving me from that daily annoyance, Free 4 Live!

This is a bad idea. Using terminal commands for this (or practically anything else) is dangerous UNLESS you are completely comfortable with the arcane UNIX-like commands.

Barry

P.S. Who in the world cares how long it takes to have a system do a normal shutdown?

Message was edited by: Barry Hemphill

And, another reason not to use a terminal command for that: there is a certain sequence the OS goes through while doing a proper shutdown; you shorten or bypass that, you're going to bork your system sooner or later. Quitting applications, closing windows, not having any items in login or cluttering up your desktop, etc. before shutdown is far more effective in speeding up both the shutdown and bootup times.

Barry Hemphill wrote:

This is a bad idea. Using terminal commands for this (or practically anything else) is dangerous UNLESS you are completely comfortable with the arcane UNIX-like commands.

P.S. Who in the world cares how long it takes to have a system do a normal shutdown?

Barry, having to wait for shutdown when you're ready to pack up your laptop is an annoyance. A minor one, admittedly, but still an annoyance. Particularly if you have a brand new computer and you know it is capable of immediate shutdown.

I do hope that those who are uncomfortable with Terminal will be cautious and make sure to use Copy and Paste to get the commands exactly right.

babowa wrote:

there is a certain sequence the OS goes through while doing a proper shutdown; you shorten or bypass that, you're going to bork your system sooner or later. Quitting applications, closing windows, not having any items in login or cluttering up your desktop, etc. before shutdown is far more effective in speeding up both the shutdown

babowa, this fix doesn't interfere with the shutdown sequence itself. It just cleans up a file that apparently sits in the way of normal shutdown. The other things you list are not "far more effective in speeding up shutdown", as they don't work to fix this problem whereas the simple file deletion does work.

I do understand that in this era of instant gratification, waiting 25 seconds is not acceptable.

If you'd like to use a terminal hack simply because you are "annoyed", go ahead - it is your machine.

We shall disagree.

Exactly, it's a free world: you may hold on to your corrupted files, and I may delete mine and have the shutdown speed the system is capable of.

By the way, I'm fine with a 25 second wait if it is necessary. But not if it's due to a problem that can easily be fixed (not with a 'hack' but simply by deleting one file that is immediately recreated by the system).

Just a small heads-up - we have a load of thunderstorms in my part of the world and when I need to shut down my iMac and disconnect it I don't have 25 seconds, I may already have run out of time. There are more setups and users than your own narrow world, don't please tell others what they should or should not do. Try and learn from the experiences of others, empathise with world views other than your own. Quite apart from the need to shut down when there is a thunderstorm overhead, I am sick of sitting around waiting for my iMac to shutdown every night before I can switch off the UPS it is connected to. I haven't yet tried removing the plist but if it works I'll probably include it in my shutdown script. Oh, and before you start flaming me, I have used Macs since before they were released to the general public, and have been an Apple Certified Developer for longer than that.

This worked for me. Tested it twice and so far shut down time was about two or three seconds. Just another bug in ML it seems.

xxMikeBxx wrote:

The fix for me was to close all running applications then tick the box to re-open windows when logging back in (I had it un-ticked before).

The shut down went from >20 seconds to about 1 second! (I have an SSD installed in my iMac.)

Now whether this stays fixed is another matter!

Just figured out how to quote people in a reply. Anyway, again, this worked for me.