Mountain Lion Password Enter Lag

Have this same issue but only when it's on battery power. I'm not password protected at the moment so when I open the lid after a few hours I would say it takes about 10 seconds or so to get the cursor moving. The delay is definitely longer than it was with Lion. I only have to deal with it once or twice a day, but it still grates. That's what happens when you get spoiled.

Note: This was happening before the Powernap update as well.

I tried resetting the SMC using apple's guide. Let's see if it helps.
I will report back here.

Update: Didn't solve anything.

Just to add to the list, I'm also seeing this since the upgrade to ML
(on a 2012 13" MBA)

As others have said, not the end of the world just annoying

Permission repair didn't do anything either.

It seems to register every key press, just not as soon as the screen loads.

I was seeing this as well since the upgrade to ML, ran Disk Utility, repaired disk, everything is normal again.

I am having this issue as well since upgrading to ML. Doesn't lag when opened within a reasonable amount of time like others have mentioned.

MBA 2011 same problem. SMC will not help. anyone did a fresh install of ML ?
also repaired disk, found some troubles but it seems that they were not the problem

Sid-R said:

Since I updated to ML.. whenever I open the lid to wake my MBA from sleep.. The screen comes up pretty quick but when I type nothing registers for quite a few seconds and then after a lag period of a few seconds I am able to type my password... This was never the case before.
Anyone else experiencing this?

Click to expand...

When your Air hibernates, it will not respond immediately. Apple "cheats" by simply showing you an image of what would be on the screen instead of the actual, interactive screen. It makes the computer appear quick to wake up, but in reality, it takes a few seconds coming out of hibernation.

If you open the lid while the computer is just sleeping, and not hibernating, it will be responsive almost immediately.

Same problem with 2012 MBA 13"

Even without upgrading Lion to Mountain Lion - I still have it (on my 2012 MBA 13")..
This seems like common problem with Mountain Lion.

No hard feelings but I can't ignore the fact that after Steve Jobs passed away, apple's reputation is being destroyed by this kind of low quality stuff.

Apple needs to stop advertising the 'instant-on' feature at this point. This is just unacceptable, and quite frankly my 2010 MBP with a regular HDD was more 'instant-on' than my 2012 MBA.

Getting rid of safe sleep has solved this problem for me. Didn't really need it anyway.

http://www.tuaw.com/2011/08/22/why-hibernate-or-safe-sleep-mode-is-no-longer-necessary-in-os/

I get this lag too on my mid 2012 MBA. Its only 1-2 seconds so its not really a big deal for me.

I don't think the issue is restricted to the MBA i have the same issue on my 2011 iMac and sometimes it can be 5 seconds or more before i can type the password! with previous versions it has been instant!

This isn't even an actual issue, it is expected behaviour with "suspend to disk" (or deep sleep) and it is an annoying one. What it does is read the sleep image from disk and put all its contents back into memory. How fast it does this is entirely dependant on how fast it can read from disk and write to memory. Having an ssd helps tremendously in this case.

What happens with the Air in this case is that when you close the lid it will "suspend to disk" AND "suspend to RAM". I believe Apple calls it safe sleep but it is sometimes also known as smart sleep. This is useful when you swap the battery (which you can't do any more) or when the battery power drops to 0%. The Air apparently has a feature where after a certain period (someone here explained it already so read back; the feature is called "standby") the machine would save power by using the "suspend to disk" and stopping the "suspend to RAM". When you open the lid after that period the machine has to wake from "suspend to disk" which will be slow. Wake from "suspend to RAM" isn't, with an ssd it is almost instant (thus "instant on"). This behaviour seems to have been introduced in Lion and from what I see here it seems to be a bit worse in Mountain Lion (it takes longer).

The obvious way of solving the issue is by turning of the safe sleep function and only using "suspend to RAM". If you do that then be sure to not let the battery life drop to 0% If it's around 20% either sleep the machine and wake it when plugged into an outlet or charge it back up immediately. This should prevent power loss and thus data loss. Another one is to use 3rd party tools that will do "suspend to RAM" up until you reach a certain percentage of battery life. After that it will do the "suspend to RAM" and "suspend to disk" to prevent data loss should the machine run out of power. You can also change the behaviour of sleep to not go into "suspend to disk"-only after this safe sleep thing. This is done by setting the standby parameter of the pmset command (you need Terminal for this). This is what the pmset manual says:

STANDBY ARGUMENTS
standby causes kernel power management to automatically hibernate a machine after it has slept for a
specified time period. This saves power while asleep. This setting defaults to ON for supported hard-
ware. The setting standby will be visible in pmset -g if the feature is supported on this machine.

standby only works if hibernation is turned on to hibernatemode 3 or 25.

standbydelay specifies the delay, in seconds, before writing the hibernation image to disk and powering
off memory for Standby.

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FYI: hibernatemode 3 means "suspend to disk" and "suspend to RAM" aka safe sleep (the naming is a bit confusing).

Strange one this, but since doing the latest updates to safari and iPhoto i've not had the lag. Even after my MBA has slept for 9 hours.

Probably has nothing to do with it, just pleased to problem had disappeared.