Leopard: Slow boot and shut down times

[orpheus1120]

I think it is proven that Leopard boots slowe than Tiger. Most people including myself encounter this problem.

For Tiger, I boot up in 25 secs max.

For Leopard, it is 35 secs. So an increase of 40% bootup time compared to Tiger.

I viewed the console log and saw some error logs which led me to believe this slow down is due primarily to having non-leopard tested apps present in the system.

For those of you who upgraded to Leopard from Tiger, and chose the Archive and Install option (this is what I did), you will most likely see error codes in the console logs once you upgraded. For example, I've got errors on MS Office 2004 etc. The system has to solve these extra errors before finally bootup which I believe leads to the slower boot time. I can't post the exact log of my system right now because I'm at my office's PC. Perhaps later I will do so.

Even if you do a clean install, the situation may not improve if you decide to install the non-leopard tested apps later. Perhaps the 10.5.2 updates will fix most of these problems.

Anyone knows if MS Office 2004 is leopard-friendly? I search for updates on office site and there's no updates on Office 2004.

 

[Amdahl]

Anyone knows if MS Office 2004 is leopard-friendly? I search for updates on office site and there's no updates on Office 2004.

I doubt they will issue any update for Leopard. Virtual PC 7 is not going to be supported (apparently), so problems mounting physical CD and the little Dock-bounce glitch will continue unless they can be fixed from Apple's side.

 

[vansouza]

Right after I installed Leopard it was absolutely booting faster then Tiger; but since I upgraded the ram from 2 to 4 gigs both shut downs and startups are much slower... and if it has to check out the 1Tb drive first that could be adding time I guess...

 

[Lurgen]

Brand new Mac Pro, 6GB, 2 x 750GB hard drives (turfed the standard 320GB drive)....

Startup and shutdowns were brilliant at first, 15 seconds to fire up, 10 to shut down. Then it suddenly turned into 5 minutes for startup and just as long for shutdown.

Turned out to be my USB hard drive (NTFS) that caused it. Not sure if the NTFS bit was the cause, or the USB aspect. Either way, disconnecting the external drive sorted it out immediately.

 

[eskdale]

slow shutdown

I've been having this issue too, I am going to try and spend sometime to resolve it today.

I do use time machine with an external wireless time capsule, but currently time machine is off after it stopped being able to mount the volume.

I have noticed the change most in the shut down times.

I have a number of older apps that might be the issue, I'll post my findings up and see if it helps.

 

[jonyboy]

windows

If you have windows
just unmount windows disk
en shutdown

Then you have a fast shutdown

 

[OMGWTFBBQ]

whoa

Brand new Mac Pro, 6GB, 2 x 750GB hard drives (turfed the standard 320GB drive)....

Startup and shutdowns were brilliant at first, 15 seconds to fire up, 10 to shut down. Then it suddenly turned into 5 minutes for startup and just as long for shutdown.

Turned out to be my USB hard drive (NTFS) that caused it. Not sure if the NTFS bit was the cause, or the USB aspect. Either way, disconnecting the external drive sorted it out immediately.

I have nearly the same setup -- mac pro (2008) 6 gigs of ram two WD 640s and a 500 and I get a 6 second shutdown (I had to reset the SMC--prior to that I was getting 30 second shutdowns) and a 36 second startup. How are you getting a 15 second startup?! I want that!

 

[Enlade]

Disable Fonts fixed it for me

Well by all means the Leopard boot and shut down times are not SLOW, but I found that Tiger was so so so much faster at this. Is it just me or do you guys have this too?

I had the same problem. It would take a very long time to boot. So, I ran the font manager (just double click on a font in the fonts folder System\Library\Fonts) and I ran the font check and found a few bad fonts. But I also noticed a lot of fonts that I know I just will never use. So, I went through each and disabled each that I would never use. Now when I rebooted the machine it started up just fine. For me it was just too many and/or bad fonts.

Prior to fixing the fonts, I also did a safe mode boot (hold shift key down during boot up...and it should ask you to log in as an administrator account). That boot up does a bit of work on the file system that could fix the problem for you as well.

And after that attempt to fix the problem, I also did a boot to the installation CD. After you boot you can go into the tools section and run the Hard Drive manager. In there you can run a check and repair of the hard drives. I ran all those checks and repairs. You should try that as well.

However, in the end the problem for me ended up being bad fonts. Disabling the fonts I didn't need and the bad ones fixed it for me.

 

[mobidev]

How long have you had the system installed? could it still be indexing for Spotlight? Do you shutdown often after brief up-times? is there an external drive attached that could be getting a Time Machine backup in progress that has to complete the current process before shutting down?

me also suffering from the slow startup and shutdown.
For my system spotlight is indexing, but when i try to stop the indexing from system preference -> spotlight -> privacy tab , the system preference is getting crashed.

I do also facing some more problems , such as Dock not showing, windows not getting minimized and application folder from the finder getting crashed when trying to open it.

Do this all may be due to Spotlight indexing the hardware or else any other prblm. if its becoz of spotlight indexing , then is there any other way to stop index by terminal...etc