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Is it normal for apps to take several seconds to open?

F

Faize

macrumors regular
Original poster
Sep 23, 2011
124
34
Having used an M2 Pro MBP for several months now, the one thing I'm not entirely thrilled with is app loading times. Ordinary productivity apps like Outlook, Chrome, etc. generally take 2-3 seconds to start (as in the main window is displayed), whereas on my Windows desktop with a 13700K, the same programs start in less than half a second.

Is there any way to speed this up? Or is this one of those rare scenarios where Intel's focus on ST performance at all costs shines?
 
Chrome launches pretty instantly on my M1 Pro, but just about all MS apps have always always been slow on every Mac I've owned all the way back to the Classic Mac OS days.
 
Sadly this is normal. Any MSFT office app I open takes a while to launch. But after if you close it and quit it'll open relatively quick again. It's only after a shutdown or reboot and you're launching the app for the 1st time does it take a longer time. There was a reason but I forget what it was. SOmething to do with the way MacOS scans an app or something. I can't remember.
 
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It's an expected behavior but I wouldn't say it's normal. Same thing happens on my side. It's the syspolicyd scanning the app, doing malware detection.

The frequency is beyond annoying. Dear Apple, can you give me a way to tell you that this application is from a trusted source, is open source and code-audited, and I know my tech level and the consequences?
 
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picpicmac said:
Standard procedure for Mac use is to not quit an application. Just close a window if you no longer need it. Then you will find the response of an app to be faster.
Click to expand...
Yes. Don't quit applications unless you think that you have too many big apps running and it might be causing high memory pressure. Like, you might think it's best to quit Photoshop before you open Final Cut Pro if you don't have lots of ram. (Check with Activity Monitor - if memory is in the green, you're OK.)

I'd even say; if you don't really need to, don't even shut down your mac. Computers nowadays are meant to manage RAM and manage quick access to data you use often. Everytime you restart your mac, this process starts from scratch; opening apps, loading libraries, settings, etc.

I have the M2 Pro Mini too (I keep it running 24/7), and the biggest app I use is Avid Pro Tools with a big folder of plugins takes about 10 seconds+ to launch. Used to be 4-5 times that on Intel.

I used to have to quit Protools when I wanted to run Adobe Lightroom, because LR uses so much ram, but now with 32GB, I can keep them both open for days and days. Life is wonderful.
 
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Faize said:
Or is this one of those rare scenarios where Intel's focus on ST performance at all costs shines?
Click to expand...
More MS vs Apple in how diligently they want to control what you are doing. ;)

But I also consider that a) macOS's origins in Unix cause problems in memory management and app loading, and b) Microsoft has been more successful in accelerating app (and system) startup as W10 and W11 have evolved.
 
Quoting myself from here:
forums.macrumors.com

Mac Mini M2 Pro isn't as fast as I thought

At least for the standalone versions (non-Cloud) of Office, after each boot, the first time you open an app, it loads/verifies/caches stuff which is very annoying. I solved it by auto-starting an AppleScript that opens the apps in the background and closes them. So when I actually need an Office...
forums.macrumors.com forums.macrumors.com

At least for the standalone versions (non-Cloud) of Office, after each boot, the first time you open an app, it loads/verifies/caches stuff which is very annoying.
I solved it by auto-starting an AppleScript that opens the apps in the background and closes them.
So when I actually need an Office app or double click a corresponding file, it opens almost instantly (and that is on +10 year old Intel Macs).
AppleScript: 
do shell script "/usr/bin/open -j '/Applications/Microsoft Excel.app'"
do shell script "/usr/bin/open -j '/Applications/Microsoft Word.app'"
tell application "Microsoft Excel" to quit
tell application "Microsoft Word" to quit

If you prefer the apps to remain active in the background, you can skip the quit lines.
 
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It caused by the fact that Microsoft apps and Chrome are sandboxed and subdivided in a lot of small frameworks. This means the dynamic linker has got to read and fix up all the various frameworks symbols, and redo the same for each app because they are sandboxed, so for example Word can't reuse the common frameworks from Excel.
Plus the occasional rescan for malware.

Latest macOS and iOS versions have some additional tricks to improve the launch speed, but require the apps to target macOS 13 or iOS 13.4: https://developer.apple.com/wwdc22/110362

Xcode 15 introduced an additional option to automatically convert dynamic libraries to static at compile time, I don't remember if it's available only on iOS or on macOS too.
 
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Yes it's normal and no it shouldn't be, mainly with how powerful the hardware is. Much like the OS performance in terms of UI draw is abysmal, stuttering, frame drops etc. It's unnaceptable with this level of hardware.

What's also unnaceptable is the amount of people here agreeing this is the reality and suggesting to not close apps? I swear I never seen so many people throwing themselves in front of incoming bullets for a company as I've seen for Apple. There's literally 0 people defending MS or Nvidia if there's a slight issue like a potential stuttering in Chrome that's acknowledged and being fixed, people just don't accept it and shouldn't accept it. Whereas here, people just let Apple roll over them and ask for more. I think this is one of the reasons why we'll never see macos as snappy and fluid in motion as Win11. Even though I prefer macOS.
 
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Faize said:
Having used an M2 Pro MBP for several months now, the one thing I'm not entirely thrilled with is app loading times. Ordinary productivity apps like Outlook, Chrome, etc. generally take 2-3 seconds to start (as in the main window is displayed), whereas on my Windows desktop with a 13700K, the same programs start in less than half a second.

Is there any way to speed this up? Or is this one of those rare scenarios where Intel's focus on ST performance at all costs shines?
Click to expand...
Apple Silicon app or Intel App? Intel Apps needs much longer, because Rosetta must start first.
 
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Sptzz said:
Yes it's normal and no it shouldn't be, mainly with how powerful the hardware is. Much like the OS performance in terms of UI draw is abysmal, stuttering, frame drops etc. It's unnaceptable with this level of hardware.

What's also unnaceptable is the amount of people here agreeing this is the reality and suggesting to not close apps? I swear I never seen so many people throwing themselves in front of incoming bullets for a company as I've seen for Apple. There's literally 0 people defending MS or Nvidia if there's a slight issue like a potential stuttering in Chrome that's acknowledged and being fixed, people just don't accept it and shouldn't accept it. Whereas here, people just let Apple roll over them and ask for more. I think this is one of the reasons why we'll never see macos as snappy and fluid in motion as Win11. Even though I prefer macOS.
Click to expand...
Some of this could be MS rather than Apple. It's well-known that Office is much better optimized for Windows than MacOS. That's not surprising. MS probably co-develops Office and Windows so they run well together.

I have one benchmark I run (opening a large flle in Word). After adjusting for differences in processor speed between my Apple and Windows machines, I determined Word is >2x more performant on Windows than on a Mac, at least for this one easily quantified task.

Details:
Fully opening a large Word doc (by "fully open", I mean you are able to scroll to the end) takes a measurable amount of time. This is much more than merely the time it takes to read the data from the SSD. Rather, it's taking a long time because Word needs to fully process and format the document. I have a large Word reference document I use (277 pages, 220 MB). On my iMac, fully opening the document takes 34 s. On my PC laptop it's 20 s.

That means, at least for this one easily-measurable task, Word runs 34/20 => 70% faster on my i5-6600 laptop than on my i9-9900K Mac, when it should actually be running ≈30% slower (based on their relative SC Geekbench scores). Thus, adjusting for the difference in computer speeds, at least for this task, Word is 1.7 x 1.3 = 2.2 x as performant on Windows as on Mac OS.
 
Ben J. said:
I'd even say; if you don't really need to, don't even shut down your mac. Computers nowadays are meant to manage RAM and manage quick access to data you use often. Everytime you restart your mac, this process starts from scratch; opening apps, loading libraries, settings, etc.
Click to expand...
That practice (not rebooting) wouldn't work for me. I need to reboot my 2019 i9 iMac about every three days. Otherwise, it begins to act wonky. No one has been able to explain why this is, but I do know others have found they also need to reboot reguarly (though perhaps not as often as I do) to maintain proper operation.

I had the same issue with at least my two prior Intel MacBook Pro's (I forgot how often I needed to reboot my 2011 MBP; but my 2014 MBP needed weekly reboots). The best explanation I've heard is that rebooting the computer returns it to a known state.

I am a heavy user, and have two attached monitors and three attached drives, so I don't know if that contributes.

By contrast, my PowerMac G5 could run for more than a year without needing a reboot.

I also have an M1 Pro MBP, but I've not used it enough to assess.

And rebooting is no big deal. Every app I use regularly opens when I boot, so once I'm logged in everything has been automatically configured.
 
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Ben J. said:
Yeah. Unless you have other, more important problems that those $6000+ USD might help you solve. :D
Click to expand...

$6000 is a trivial amount of money to throw at "more important problems". Investing in Apple technology gives you all the tools to solve those "more important problems" for yourself.
 
theorist9 said:
Exactly. If your roof needs repair, you don't need a roofer, you can solve that problem by buying a $6,000 M3 Max.
Click to expand...
Well, at least you will be able to visualize a dry house, in whatever the HD equivalent is for those tiny screens..
 
Faize said:
Having used an M2 Pro MBP for several months now, the one thing I'm not entirely thrilled with is app loading times. Ordinary productivity apps like Outlook, Chrome, etc. generally take 2-3 seconds to start (as in the main window is displayed), whereas on my Windows desktop with a 13700K, the same programs start in less than half a second.

Is there any way to speed this up? Or is this one of those rare scenarios where Intel's focus on ST performance at all costs shines?
Click to expand...
Impossible. Only replace the integrated SSD from apple with Samsung 990Pro, but that's impossible. The speed of processing and working with small 4KB blocks is extremely low. Higher the speed of this parameter - faster the system
 
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I've noticed this slowness with certain apps opening as well (I'm using an M1 Max MacBook Pro). It isn't just Chrome and other third-party apps, though they are often are the worst offenders. But today, for example, I noticed how slowly Pages opened. It of course doesn't happen every time I open these apps, but often the first time after not using the app in a while or after restarting my laptop. It is quite disappointing and it is noticeable how lacking in "snappiness" macOS is. Heck, my 2018 AMD Ryzen 2600X PC opens apps faster than this device.
 
VisceralRealist said:
I've noticed this slowness with certain apps opening as well (I'm using an M1 Max MacBook Pro). It isn't just Chrome and other third-party apps, though they are often are the worst offenders. But today, for example, I noticed how slowly Pages opened. It of course doesn't happen every time I open these apps, but often the first time after not using the app in a while or after restarting my laptop. It is quite disappointing and it is noticeable how lacking in "snappiness" macOS is. Heck, my 2018 AMD Ryzen 2600X PC opens apps faster than this device.
Click to expand...

Funny you mention Pages. I have a 2012 cMBP running Mavericks with Pages '09 and it opens instantly, without even a single bounce. My 2020 iMac on the other hand takes at least 3 bounces to open the latest version. Takes even longer on my M1 MBA.

macOS has become so bloated with superfluous garbage that Apple doesn't even care about general OS snappiness anymore.
 
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It's not only the system fault, it's the way the apps are written. Pages has got ~200 MB of dynamic libraries, Microsoft Word ~700 MB. That's a lot of code to fix at startup.
 
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This might be relevant:
forums.macrumors.com

Syspolicyd making apps very slow to open on M1 Max

So I just noticed that the process "syspolicyd" makes the apps very slow to open on M1 Max. Is there a way to reset this process? If I disable SIP the apps open instant. Here are some more info about this issue: On affected system - if you launch Activity Monitor and look at CPU resources -...
forums.macrumors.com forums.macrumors.com

Simple test to check if syspolicyd is contributing: temporarily disable SIP.
 
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