Upgrade taking excessive time (15 hours and counting)

Question

jpgoldberg Author

Level 1

29 points

Upgrade taking excessive time (15 hours and counting)

I have two upgrades in progress. One on a Mid 2010 Mac Pro, the other on a Mid 2011 27-inch iMac.

I haven't measured the time precisely, but this is what I'm seeing with the upgrade.

About 1 hour at "22 minutes remaining"
another hour at "1 hour 48 minutes remaining",
10 hours at "2 minutes remaining"
and so far one hour at "1 minute remaining"

So so far, these have been going for more than 15 hours

The details differ between the Mac Pro and the iMac, but each has spent at least 8 at or under "about 3 minutes remaining"

I have now heard anecdotes suggesting that having something like TeXLive or macports installed can cause some very slow Yosemite installations. Perhaps because of having a large number of "non-Apple" files outside of /User. I have both MacPorts and TeXLive on both of those machines.

I tried ⌘L on the Mac Pro in an attempt to view logs, but that is now beach balling.

Any suggestions would be welcome, but I particularly welcome input from those who have some experiencing with working through this problem.

Mac Pro, OS X Mavericks (10.9.5)

Posted on Oct 17, 2014 10:31 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Oct 17, 2014 10:36 AM in response to jpgoldberg

Hi ..

If you are using Wi-Fi to download Yosemite on multiple Macs simultaneously, better to do the download and installation on one Mac at a time. Otherwise it's going to take forever.

On a broadband high speed internet connection, the download and installation takes roughly 45 minutes to an hour. Your Macs will restart several times automcatically.

Reply

Answer 2

jpgoldberg Author

Level 1

29 points

Oct 17, 2014 10:51 AM in response to jpgoldberg

I'm going to quote a post,, from a Macrumors forum which seems to suggest that having a lot of "non-Apple" stuff outside of /Users is the culprit

http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=19397517&postcount=19

Checking the installation log, the installer started, 5 hours ago, to copy /usr/local sub directories one file at a time.

I have made an average of 10 files copied per second.

Since I have installed a lot of stuff in the /usr/local directory using Homebrew, added a lot of gems in my Ruby of Rails projects and use rvm to manage many versions of Ruby, I have a lot of these tiny files. Just with Latex or X-Windows packages and the dependency packages, there is more than 1.3 million files.

So, 40 hours to wait.

One issue (question) remains: what happened when the installer log shared buffer has reached its limit (128 x 1024 lines): did the installer continue to copy files or the logger creates an exception capable to stop the whole process?

Reply

Answer 3

jpgoldberg Author

Level 1

29 points

Oct 17, 2014 10:56 AM in response to Carolyn Samit

Hi Carolyn,

It seems I wasn't sufficiently clear in my question. The installer is already downloaded. The download wasn't the slow part.

I am talking about what I see when running the installer itself.

Reply

Answer 4

Oct 17, 2014 11:02 AM in response to jpgoldberg

Mine took about two hours to finish. It was stuck at "2 minutes" for the majority of the time. I waited mine out and the installation went fine.

Reply

Answer 5

jpgoldberg Author

Level 1

29 points

Oct 17, 2014 11:42 AM in response to jpgoldberg

The iMac finally finished (after about 18 hours). The MacPro is still working at it.

The ⌘L finally stopped beach balling and showed me some logs that confirm that the upgrade process is moving some files, one by one, back from a local backup it made.

So at least at this point in time, these are files from current and past TeXLive stuff that are being copied back, one by one.s t

So I've got two choices.

I can wait it out.
I can start over, which involves:

Interrupt to process
Restore Mavericks from Backup
Remove as much of the troublesome stuff from my system
Try the upgrade again.

Well, as I'm told that there are only two minutes left, I think I'll wait it out.

Reply

Answer 6

ivar v

Level 1

25 points

Oct 17, 2014 1:41 PM in response to jpgoldberg

Here's a very handy article that's explaining what's going on and how to mitigate it (before you start the upgrade):

https://jimlindley.com/blog/yosemite-upgrade-homebrew-tips/

Reply

Answer 7

jubinho

Level 1

0 points

Apr 18, 2015 6:21 AM in response to jpgoldberg

Good to hear that you guys have managed to get it working fine.

i just got this macbook white unibody with snow leapord installed, ofcourse from gumtree. I tried to upgrade it to os x yosemite. downloaded it successfully in like 40 mins but then when i tried to install it, it started the installation, restarted the macbook fine and then os x installer appeared on the screen showing 23 minutes left in installing the new os x.

Now thts where i m stuck from last 3 hours without any progress. Even progress bar is not moving at all.looks like installation has never started. Now i tried to force reboot it and tried to quit installer and went to choose started disk which still has old os x on it, message keeps on saying i cant select the highlighted startup disk. Im stuck guys cant even go back to old one now. need some real help. Thank you.

Reply