El Capitan boot and login extremely slow

Had the beachball everywhere. Couple seconds of it before the password prompt appears on wake up and login: beachball. Half-way into typing the password: beachball. Press enter on password: beachball. Hover over menu bar after desktop appears: beachball. The menu bar would also be all around unresponsive throughout the day and always took several seconds to update the battery/charging status, to display when the VPN is connecting or connected, or when refreshing the clock after hours of sleep.

AndyVideoLog's fix (see image) completely and immediately fixed the issue for me, no reboot needed. It's been about a day now and it hasn't disappeared then reappeared like it did after the upgrade from Sierra to High Sierra and from 10.13.0 to 10.13.1. I'm using a 2017 MacBook Pro with FileVault 2.

After weeks of searching the internet I could not find the answer to a similar problem. I upgraded to a Pcie SSD (1400mb/s read/ 1430 mb/s write) and restored the SSD from my older sata 3 SSD. Everything worked fine and boot up was really quick, but after logging in it would take 1 to 2 minutes for all my hard drives to show up, I have 8 drives in total. During this time I would get the beachball or just really slow logins. I just fixed the issue today, it was permissions. This is on Sierra 10.12 so it may be a little different but if I can help one person from going through this than job well done.

THE FIX

1. Go to your boot hard drive

2. Go to Users

3. Right Click on Home Icon with admin name

4. Click get info

5. On the very Bottom unlock by pressing the lock icon and entering your password

6. Click on the setting icon and click apply to all sub folders.

This worked for me.

Greetings saitenschlager,

Thanks for the question. If I understand correctly, the computer takes a while to boot to the desktop. I would recommend that you read this article, it may be able to help the issue.

Resolve startup issues and perform disk maintenance with Disk Utility and fsck - Apple Support

Thanks for using Apple Support Communities.
Take care

In addition see if you have File Vault enabled. If none of the above procedures provide a solution you may wish to try turning off File Vault to see if it remedies this.

I had similar issues. I ended up creating a new user admin acct and that had no lag issues. So then I just deleted my old user account and chose to save the data/home file and then renamed the new account to match the old one and it got rid of most of the lag when I logged back in to this newly revised account.

Have you run any "cleaning" or "optimizing" apps on your Mac? Do you have any AV software installed?

according to many entries in various forums, EC seems to have a serious problem regarding 'booting'. Most complains are related to 'hang' in a boot operation. But complains like mario49 are also heard. The link mentioned above is not a solution.... sorry.

Although I have not yet found the reasons for the poor performance of El Capitan on my Mac Mini, I have found a workaround that is almost 100% effective.

Early in the boot-up process, the screen displays a gray Apple logo with a narrow gray progress bar below. The progress bar increases in length noticeably for about a minute, but then slows significantly at about the 60%-70% mark. At this point, I press and hold the power button on the back of the computer for five seconds, which causes the computer to shut down. Then I immediately press the power button again to initiate another start-up. I find that it proceeds normally and quickly, and that I no longer get the spinning beachball every few seconds all day long.

I don’t know if it is relevant, by my machine is configured NOT to display a login dialog on start-up.

If you find this workaround to be successful for you, please add a posting here. It may eventually help us diagnose this problem better.

If you have skill in interpreting console messages, I could post messages before and after the forced shutdown. That might also help us diagnose this problem better.

My configuration: Mac Mini, late 2009, 2.6 GHz Core 2 Duo, 4 GB RAM, 500 GB internal disk with 130 GB partition for El Capitan, 1 TB Western Digital FireWire 800 external disk for Time Machine

In my case it was resolved by a downgrade to 10.8 After that my computer was fast again (thx Apple)

I have a MacPro early 2008 and had similar issue with extremely slow startup. After resetting the PRAM all is good again.