Mavericks takes 2 min 18 sec to go to sleep?????

It would help to give us more information about your computer. If you can, use EtreCheck Etresoft: EtreCheck to generate a system report and paste it in a response here.

I've noticed that my shutdowns are longer than with ML. With ML, shutdown was almost instantaneous, and now mine are about 20 seconds. 20 seconds I can live with.

Your problem may be related to not enough free space on your HD. Your mac partition has only 14/219 GB free, which is 6%. Definitely not enough. 10-15 percent is the usual recommended minimum, more if you are doing very memory intensive things like video editing.

Some basic maintenance may help: Boot into your recovery partition (restart, hold down ⌘R until you see the Apple logo), and use Disk Utility to repair your hard drive. Repair permissions too while you're there. OS X: About OS X Recovery

Try a safe boot (restart, hold down shift until you see the Apple logo), and then shut down. If the shutdown is shorter, then you know the problem is with some third-party software you have installed. Mac OS X: What is Safe Boot, Safe Mode?

Here's a page with some suggestions: How to fix slow shutdown and startup times. | MacTip.net I just tried the Terminal commands at the end, and my shutdown is faster, about 15 seconds.

There are some other suggestions circulating on the interwebs (for example, here: Fix Slow Shutdown in OS X 10.8-10.9 - MacRumors Forums ). The shutdown process is evidently very important in terms of shutting processes down correctly. Trying to force it to shut down faster may be harmful. I'm mentioning this here so you will avoid fixes like those in the MacRumors page, and perhaps someone with more knowledge about this can comment.

Even if you are not doing any intensive work, you still don't have enough free space on your HD. what other objections do you have to my suggestions?

Was the new user account still while you were in safe mode?

Delete the Startup Items from /Library/StartupItems/ and test your Mac for performance. There are additional troubleshooting steps you can take if that does not result in any change.

Do not use Terminal to change any default exit timeout settings. If you were to do that you might as well force the Mac to shut down. Mavericks will shut down faster than Mountain Lion if it has been properly installed without clever hacks or similar modifications.

Downloading illegally obtained software from torrent sites is a certain way to invite malware. That comment is strictly due to the presence of uTorrent, which you may or may not have used to do that.

The problem is completely unrelated to the amount of remaining disk space. As you already observed, OS X's performance will not be affected until unallocated disk space becomes almost literally zero. Requiring any particular minimum percentage is a popular myth. When the available disk space falls below a threshold monitored by OS X, an informative dialog will appear.

John Galt wrote:

The problem is completely unrelated to the amount of remaining disk space. As you already observed, OS X's performance will not be affected until unallocated disk space becomes almost literally zero. Requiring any particular minimum percentage is a popular myth. When the available disk space falls below a threshold monitored by OS X, an informative dialog will appear.

Are you sure about that John?

Spinning disk performance is reduced at the slower end of the drive platters (e.g. the center).

Here is a graph of 3 drives…

http://macperformanceguide.com/images/SeagateMomentus/graph-fill-volume-compare. gif

Swap is pre-allocated, so that should be at the start of the disk, however the caches & temp files will be written to free space, which will now be in the last regions of the disk. The IO will be running about 20-30% slower than an empty disk.

The bootcamp partition should be at the very slowest end of the disk (sneaky Apple) but he will still be at a reduced throughput.

I had all sorts of slowdowns on a system with an almost full OS HD (100-200GB free on a 1TB HD).

Personally I think OS X benefits from a little extra space, especially if any of the Adobe Apps are like Photoshop e.g wants a disk cache.

Yes. OS X's performance will not be affected until unallocated disk space becomes almost literally zero.

Well written software will also inform the user if it requires more disk space than is available. I have no idea what Adobe does.

Your graph contains no units so it conveys no useful information.

CD$ wrote:

Startup Items:

HWNetMgr - Path: /Library/StartupItems/HWNetMgr

HWPortDetect - Path: /Library/StartupItems/HWPortDetect

RelianceMODEM - Path: /Library/StartupItems/RelianceMODEM

Launch Daemons:

[loaded] com.adobe.fpsaud.plist

[loaded] com.disc-soft.DAEMONTools.PrivilegedHelper.plist

[loaded] com.microsoft.office.licensing.helper.plist

[loaded] org.macosforge.xquartz.privileged_startx.plist

Launch Agents:

[loaded] org.macosforge.xquartz.startx.plist

User Launch Agents:

[loaded] com.BlueStacks.AppPlayer.LogRotator.plist

[loaded] com.BlueStacks.AppPlayer.Service.plist

[loaded] com.BlueStacks.AppPlayer.UninstallAgent.plist

[loaded] com.BlueStacks.AppPlayer.UpdaterAgent.plist

[loaded] com.facebook.videochat.apple.plist

[loaded] com.google.keystone.agent.plist

[failed] com.valvesoftware.steamclean.plist

User Login Items:

uHD-Agent

SpeechSynthesisServer

RealPlayer Downloader Agent

I'd try to update or remove the above items, depending on what you need to run.

Bluestacks AppPlayer is in Beta right?

I'm not sure how well it has been tested, can you uninstall it to see if has any effect?

Is quartzx up to date…

http://xquartz.macosforge.org/landing/

Steamclean is a failed user level job - so if that is behaving badly it could cause issues. Update it or disable the job (remove the plist from ~/Library/LaunchAgents).

Is Deamon tools up to date? http://www.disc-soft.com/home

I'm not sure why it needs a system level background daemon to mount disk images?

Also check the login items & pref panes are all up to date.

You can also logout, and then login, but hold shift after you click the login button, that will disable login items (similar to safe mode).

If the system sleeps with them disabled you know it is time to remove them & get them updated.