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Catalina boot time very slow

V

Valkyre

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Dec 8, 2012
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I am using a Retina Macbook pro 15" 2012.

The boot time of all the macos that I have intalled in it booted extremely fast, ranging from 10 secs to like 20 at most.

Since installing the Catalina betas the boot time is ridiculously slow. It takes more than 1 minute, close to 90 secs.

Yes I know it is a beta and I expected it to be a bit slow (even though previous macos betas of High sierra were booting fast too) but I see absolutely no improvement with each installed beta.

Are Catalina slow to boot generally, do other people face such long boot times?
 
Only time will tell. It could be that Catalina adds a ton of software that older hardware will struggle to load and run. It also could be diagnostic data is being collected during and after boot.

Not sure if previous macOS betas have taken longer than usual to boot but reading about that to see if it’s a beta thing might help.
 
thats right after dev beta 3 is booting slow, 10 seconds slowly... imac 2011 GTX 860 card..
 
ruslan120 said:
Only time will tell. It could be that Catalina adds a ton of software that older hardware will struggle to load and run. It also could be diagnostic data is being collected during and after boot.

Not sure if previous macOS betas have taken longer than usual to boot but reading about that to see if it’s a beta thing might help.
Click to expand...

My 2019 8 Core 15" MBP takes around a minute to boot up. I think the OS is just slow to load at the moment. Hopefully it will speed up on release, but wouldn't be surprised for it to be 10.15.3 or so either.
 
I reckon the slow startup will NOT get sorted until you reinstall your Mac entirely, and I do not mean install and import from Time Machine. With the significant move from 32/64-bit to only 64-bit, there will be a lot of crab left over from old installations, and also if you have an installation that was migrated from Mac OS Extended to APFS, to the new Catalina setup, you'll have some interesting boot sectors lying around.

All-in-all - if there was ever a reason to start from "scratch" the Catalina macOS is it.
 
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Beta's have a lot of debug tools turned on for testing purposes. This generally slows down everything. Once it's out of beta, it's likely you'll see much of the speed return (if not all).
 
On the traditional Macs without Apple SSD and T2, the switch to APFS has brought a dramatic slow down of boot times even on third party SSDs. This has been an issue since High Sierra.
I do not think Apple cares about that.
 
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haralds said:
On the traditional Macs without Apple SSD and T2, the switch to APFS has brought a dramatic slow down of boot times even on third party SSDs. This has been an issue since High Sierra.
I do not think Apple cares about that.
Click to expand...
Apple doesn't care about seven year old hardware to begin with.
 
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haralds said:
On the traditional Macs without Apple SSD and T2, the switch to APFS has brought a dramatic slow down of boot times even on third party SSDs. This has been an issue since High Sierra.
I do not think Apple cares about that.
Click to expand...
Agree, I had a 2017 MacBook Pro and did install Catalina , on top of Mojave , Mojave run without any flaws and the speed was always absolutely just fine. Understanding that Catalina its a Beta , the performance on the MacBook Pro was less than stellar, after installing Catalina Beta . Basically logging in took a long time and performing certain tasks was daunting . There were freezes , and so for . I got a good deal buying a new 2019 MacBook Pro just a few days ago , now , the difference in performance and issues using Catalina are very noticeable , I have a fast log in and the overall feeling is very different , so I do wonder if newer machines are design to run faster and better with the newest software ?
 
I think the difference is that you upgraded Mojave to Catalina, with all the crab included. The performance difference between a '17 and a '19 MacBook Pro is not that big.

Has anyone tried installing a fresh installation of Catalina on older HW? And not imported a profile from Time Machine?
 
I've been running it on a Late 2013 MBP. No discernible speed decrease here.

I have upgraded the SSD to a 970 Evo 2TB which uses 4 PCI-E lanes instead of Apple's 2, however, which speeds things up.
 
Killerbob said:
I reckon the slow startup will NOT get sorted until you reinstall your Mac entirely, and I do not mean install and import from Time Machine. With the significant move from 32/64-bit to only 64-bit, there will be a lot of crab left over from old installations...
Click to expand...
Crab?

Moving from 32 to 64 bit shouldn't make a big difference, 32bit apps are just not supported anymore, that's it.
Telling people to do a "clean install" isn't a good advice... you even advise not to use a backup. That's absurd.
 
First of all, I am not advising, I am asking for advice. Second, doing a clean install, and then migrating from Time Machine into a new macOS, sort of defeats the purposes, doesn’t it?

In your old installation you would have had 32-bit applications, utilities that only worked with Mojave, High Sierra, etc., and if like me about 250 installations, of which you may use 100-150. Even when you drag these to the trash, you know as well as I do you do not delete all traces of that app. You leave behind plist files, settings files in /Application Support, in /Preferences, etc.

Add to that all the 32-bit “helper” files that no longer works in Catalina, and in addition, the changed setup with volumes, and you have a pretty good reason to NOT migrate from Time Machine using Migration Assistant.
 
Killerbob said:
I reckon the slow startup will NOT get sorted until you reinstall your Mac entirely, and I do not mean install and import from Time Machine. With the significant move from 32/64-bit to only 64-bit, there will be a lot of crab left over from old installations, and also if you have an installation that was migrated from Mac OS Extended to APFS, to the new Catalina setup, you'll have some interesting boot sectors lying around.

All-in-all - if there was ever a reason to start from "scratch" the Catalina macOS is it.
Click to expand...
My 2019 15" 8 Core MBP was a clean install. I no longer use Time Machine as all my docs are backed up to the cloud.

When I bought it (moving from a 2018 rMBA) I just re-downloaded all the apps I needed from the Mac Appstore and my docs sync'd when I signed in to iCloud.

So I don't think that a clean install will solve anyone's slow boot. I will try it again out of curiosity on release. But I wouldn't hold out much hope given we're on Beta 5 and it's still the same.
 
From the folks responding here it seems like I am not alone lol. I guess we hope that the final release will improve. If 2019 macbook pros are slow then it is not my hardware for sure. Its the OS. Hope it gets sorted out because 1 minute+ boot times when before it only took you 10-20 secs, are really bothering.
 
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i have the catalina public beta installed on my old 2013 macbook pro. previously it was running sierra. i immediately noticed the boot times jump from 20-30s on sierra to over a minute on catalina.

my current machine is a 2018 macbook pro on mojave. it *also* takes close to a minute to boot, which has been making me wonder if apple in general regressed bootup performance on recent OSes (perhaps the new filesystem?) and just can't be bothered to fix it.

i see a couple of people here saying "i got a newer machine/clean install and its faster" or "i haven't noticed a slowdown". i mean, its heartening if there are examples where mjoave/catalina are working well, as it means we can potentially troubleshoot these issues, but i'm also wary at qualitative statements. can anyone who's machine "feels" fast post their boot time so we have an apples-to-apples discussion about what type of boot times are possible?
 
Mac Pro 2013, 3.5GHz (6C), 64GB RAM, 1TB SSD, 2xD700 - and a lot of crap installed. Several TB2 connections (incl. Sonnet PCIe box), 2 DP Monitors, external card readers, TB connected NAS, and network.

Under Mojave it took about 30-35 seconds from chime to login. With Catalina B5, it takes 45-50 seconds. So definitely slower, but not remarkably so.
 
Just as an FYI:

I screwed up my installation, and had to do a restore from Time Machine - I went into Recovery and restored, and now my boot from chime to login is at 25 seconds. It actually got 15-25 seconds faster. Why I don't know...
 
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Not for me. Got a 2014 Mac mini 2.6ghz 8gb ram. The internal was super slow. Took almost 2 minutes to boot. Had a lot of crap. Backed it all up to an external 3.0. Reformatted the internal and used recovery to reinstall high sierra. Now it boots 50 seconds. Faster but still kinda slow.

On April 21st I got a used lacie rugged with thunderbolt and usb 3.0 ports from eBay for 60 bucks. Warranty expired in 2015 so no harm in opening her up. The lacie was a mechanical not SSD and was about 110mbps compared to the internal in my mini which was about 80mbps.

I replaced the spinner in the lacie with a sandisk plus 240gb SSD. It is 545 read and 450 write according to their website. I amusing a thunderbolt connection. It came with a black thunderbolt cable. Not sure if its thunderbolt 1 or 2. But 2014 mini has thunderbolt 2 so that is the max. Its only 324/329 mbps. Not super fast but compared to the internal it is much better.

Anyhow to my surprise its super fast. I clean installed Catalina 10.15.4 on the lacie. And I was in high Sierra and in system preferences I selected startup disk and then did a restart. And it took 23 seconds from the chime to boot to Catalina to where I put my password in.

Even if I hold down the option key on boot. When I see the disks available. If I select my lacie rugged, from when I select the external to when I put my password in it takes 13 seconds. Not bad compared to the 50 seconds of my internal.
 
my early 2015 13" Macbook pro with Sabrent rocket Nvme 1TB under Catalina 10.15.4 from chime to login: 29 secs to 31 secs ,actually not bad at all.
 
My 2015 MacBook Pro with 256GB Apple SSD running the latest 10.15.4 boots in about 22 secs.
 
That is weird. Vince nvme is taking 29 seconds to boot and taz ssd is only 22 seconds. Shouldn't a nvme be faster than an ssd?
 
ivnj said:
That is weird. Vince nvme is taking 29 seconds to boot and taz ssd is only 22 seconds. Shouldn't a nvme be faster than an ssd?
Click to expand...

I think you are confusing protocol type (NVMe, PCIe) with storage type (SSD).

The SMG0256 SSD in my MacBook Pro is about 920MB/s write and 1360MB/s read.
 
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