Mojave slow to boot

Exact same issue/behaviour here, MBPR mid-2015 with a Samsung EVO 970 2TB NVMe M.2 SSD. TRIM cannot be disabled on this SSD AFAIK.

I've trawled the forums looking for a solution and am not keen to:
1. start over with a fresh install of Mojave 10.14.2 (seems it may not work anyway);
2. reinstall from a TM backup (seems overkill) - EDIT 2: did this and resolved the issue - now boots in 18 seconds;
3. convert APFS back to HFS+ (Really necessary?).

In verbose mode the following (see attached file) is visible at the 'boot loading pause'. Does it mean anything to anybody here? I don't currently understand what it means.

My 'restart' boot time is consistently 34 seconds from chime to login. I know it's not really long but it's annoying when I'm trying to do live audio work. Shutdown and reboot can be around a minute. Any ideas?

EDIT 1:
I've installed basic Mojave 10.14.2 on two different external SSDs; one to a Samsung EVO 850 1TB (APFS) and one a clone of the Samsung EVO 850 1TB to a 500GB OEM Apple SSD in an Envoy Pro Enclosure (HFS+). Both boot quite fast: APFS formatted drive - 24secs, HFS+ formatted drive - 20secs. No hang. WTaF is going on?

EDIT 2: See above...

EDIT 3:
The insanity continues. I had an offer from a guy to purchase the OEM SSD/Envoy Pro enclosure so I prepared it by formatting it and installing Mojave 10.14.2. (had to clone it from another disk 'cos the Envoy Pro wouldn't allow macOS installation...uggggh - will report that to OWC). I booted with 'Option' at startup to select the internal startup disk - the MacBook had automatically set the new ext. drive as my startup disk. In system preferences, I changed it back to the internal for the default startup drive and restarted. Then it took well over 60 seconds to startup - several times repeated this. So, again I restored from the last TM backup. Startup is now down to 24 seconds - still longer than before but manageable. Why does this happen?

 

So, Anybody got any ideas on why this happens?

 

I reinstalled my system three weeks ago, enabled FileVault and installed Little Snitch. It has had normal boot times ever since. Not sure why, but there may have been some old system extension messing things up.

Now it refuses to remember my wallpaper for my secondary monitor again though, which was solved with the update from High Sierra to Mojave...

 

Looks like they have fixed it in the 10.14.3 uptade version released today!

 

So now that they have it fixed, anyone know what caused it to happen in the first place? I'm just curious and I'm not a developer programer.

 

For me, it is better now, but not solved.
Still takes about 25~27 seconds to show the apple logo and after that more 35 seconds to get the system ready to use.

Hope it gets fully fixed next time.

 

Absolutely no difference for my system. I still have no idea why it's happening.

 

Wow... Did you try the combo update?

 

I'm not sure what you mean. What is this 'combo update'? I simply updated to 10.14.3, as suggested.

 

https://support.apple.com/kb/DL1992?locale=pt_BR

It's a downloadable file that contains all updates since the original Mojave was released.
Try it and see if gets better.

 

I'm not sure why this would have any benefit over the individual updates but I tried it anyway. Zero improvement to boot time - stuck at 35 seconds. Thanks anyway.

 

35 seconds is pretty good. I'd be very happy if it stayed like that. We are no where near the age of instant on. Not sure we ever will be. The problems in this thread were generally minutes, not seconds.

 

Yeah, the thing is that my system used to boot in around 20 seconds some moons ago.

I changed internal SSD, messed around with setting it up and at one point it was taking up to 2-3 minutes to boot.

After much screwing around and testing I got it down to 30 secomds and now it's up again to 35. The white bar pauses at around 15 seconds after the first chime and just hangs there for about 15 seconds. This seems weird to me.

Anyway, I guess I can live with 35 seconds.

 

Tried now the new update... Same 1min for the complete boot.