Level 1

26 points

Time Machine extremely slow after upgrade to El Cap

Time Machine problem with upgrade from Yosemite to El Cap on a MBPr 15" mid-2012 laptop.

Time Machine backup scheme: by wifi or wired LAN to two different hard drives attached to a Mac Mini that's on the LAN. The two drives USB'd to the Mini serve as backup disks for a total of 4 Macs in the house.

Time Machine behavior under Yosemite: dead normal. Backups were fast (10MB/sec over wifi, 80MB/sec when I plugged the MBPr into my LAN using a Thunderbolt to Ethernet adapter. Backups restored (I test them occasionally) fine.

I upgraded yesterday to El Capitan. Time Machine behavior now: Excruciatingly slow. Every step (preparing, backing up, cleaning up) takes hours. My laptop has been connected to the wired LAN for 9 hours now and is only 1.26GB through a 3.82GB backup. Speed (from MenuMeters) is under 10KB/sec - yes, that's *kilo*bytes/sec.

File transfer speed between the two machines via drag & drop is fine, ~80MB/sec both ways on LAN, about 12MB/sec over wifi. The laptop interacts with the web at normal speeds. It seems to be only Time Machine that's hosed, and only on my newly-El Capitaned laptop. My other household machines (all on Yosemite still) back up normally.

I've tried:

- power down/restart both machines;

- power down/restart the entire LAN;

- cycle Time Machine on/off in System Prefs;

- remove the two disks as laptop TM backup targets, then re-specify using TM preferences;

- other things I've found through searching this problem.

This is a common problem to judge from the many ElCap upgraders who have encountered it. I have searched quite a lot and found nothing that has helped me.

I can't work without a viable backup. For now, I am using Carbon Copy Cloner to duplicate my MBPr SSD to an external hard drive. Not exactly satisfactory.

Has anyone solved this problem? Can anyone point me to, or suggest, a solution? Thanks very much!

MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X Yosemite (10.10), 2x mini i7 quad core, rMBP, iPad,

Posted on Feb 26, 2016 4:47 PM

22 replies

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,739 points

Mar 1, 2016 9:32 AM in response to ridgecritter

You seem to have ruled out everything except a network issue as the cause of the problem. You're also getting unusual network errors from iCloud. If I were in your place, I'd look carefully at my router configuration, and maybe reset it to the defaults. Failing that, I'd replace the router.

ridgecritter Author

Level 1

26 points

Mar 1, 2016 11:29 AM in response to Linc Davis

Rebooted the router, no change in TM. Reset the router to its default config, rebooted it, no change in TM.

Next - Configured my laptop for manual LAN address, no change in TM. Left it on manual address for the moment.

Next - turned off the firewall (Sys Prefs) on the backup target Mini - no change in TM. Re-enabled firewall.

Next - turned off firewall on my laptop. Suddenly, the backupd process went from CPU usage of 0.1% to ~40% for about 3 minutes. It's back down to 0.1% now. TM is still "preparing backup". Get Info (Statistics tab) under Activity Monitor shows backupd is trying ports between 110 and 125 (that I've seen so far). No hangs but the fault counter is incrementing constantly.

Latest - turned off firewall on backup target Mini, no change in TM or backupd process. Still "preparing backup".

Plans - a. Tonight, I'm going to use a Yosemite boot flash drive to see if I can restore my laptop's last known Yosemite configuration to an external, bootable hard drive. I hope that will let me test if TM still works on my laptop under Yosemite, and I'll do the console logging you suggested earlier to look for differences. Will report what happens.

b. I may replace my router with my Airport Extreme Base and use it as the LAN router (it's currently just an access point).

I find this a real head scratcher...

ridgecritter Author

Level 1

26 points

Mar 2, 2016 6:31 PM in response to Linc Davis

Found the problem. I had MenuMeters (the fork for El Capitan) on the laptop. I removed it, Time Machine now runs normally. Don't know why TM didn't work under Safe Boot, which should have not loaded MM. But, problem solved.

Mar 28, 2016 8:12 AM in response to ridgecritter

Oh, I was about to post that MenuMeter was the cause of the problem for me, but you've been much much faster than me 🙂

In case some people want to follow this issue : https://github.com/yujitach/MenuMeters/issues/19

Best Regards,

LittleBigFox

Apr 7, 2016 7:23 AM in response to Linc Davis

@Linc Davis, have been using TM for many years. Got the slowliness problem described in this discussion since upgrading. I was about to follow your recommandation (moving the /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine.plist file elsewhere) and run TM anew...

Went to the directory and found NO such file in the directory...!?!? Any idea if that would explain my slowliness problem

/Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine.plist

Configuration : Upgraded to El Capitan AND installing an SSD drive (on MBPro 13", may 2010) in December 2015. Never managed to run a complete backup since...

earlyzee

Level 1

4 points

Sep 13, 2016 7:59 AM in response to ridgecritter

(I’m sharing my solution on several forums where this issue has been posted.)

After upgrading from Mountain Lion to El Capitan on a Mac Pro, I saw a speed reduction of over 90%

in the Time Machine backup process. I use an external USB3/FW800 backup drive; both interfaces exhibited the problem. I followed other users’ advice, disabling virus scanning and Spotlight on the target drive, disconnecting peripherals, stopping & starting, setting Sleep to “Never,” etc. (I did not try any of the Safe Mode procedures or Terminal system hacks.) I got negligible improvement.

Here’s what worked. I disconnected from the network, in my case by unplugging the ethernet cable but others may need to turn off wifi. Then I turned off the full-time virus monitoring on the whole machine. (I use Sophos, where that function is called “On-Access Scanning”.) The full speed was immediately restored.

Obviously this won’t work for anyone who backs up over their network or wifi — you’d be vulnerable while virus monitoring is off. Or for those who use the continuous Time Machine scheduling. But if, like me, you use Time Machine for occasional manual backups (I go once a week), you’ll be happy.

And perhaps with this clue Apple can modify its Time Machine code to improve its dismal performance.

Sep 28, 2016 3:36 PM in response to ridgecritter

thank you. your post helped! i just disabled all meters and didn't uninstall.

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Time Machine extremely slow after upgrade to El Cap