VERY slow shutdown spinning busy

[gogreen1]

My iMac (Mojave 10.14.6) has been taking forever to shut down and restart recently. I've looked in the logs and found plenty of shutdown reports, but how do I interpret them to identify the culprit and fix the problem?

 

[HDFan]

I"d first start by disconnecting all peripherals and see if that makes a difference. If it doesn't, for the shutdown if the logs don't show the difficulty (and they often don't) try booting into Safe Mode and time the shutdown. If the shutdown is much faster in Safe Mode that would point to software slowing the shutdown. Create a test user and shutdown as the test user to help determine if it is system software or something related to your account.

Slow restarts can be caused by a lot of things, such as startup items going out to the internet but being blocked from connecting. Little snitch will do that. It becomes a process of elimination. Removing login items in the Users & Groups preferences is a start. If that doesn't work then it becomes a process of eliminating LaunchAgents & LaunchDaemons.

 

[gogreen1]

Thank you, HDFan. I disconnected my portable hard drive, but that didn't make a difference. Safe Mode shutdown was fast, so I'll be creating a test user account next, even though I highly suspect one or two login items might be the problem. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction on this!

 

[gogreen1]

Problem solved! Turns out the problem was, indeed, a login item, as I had suspected. Restart and shutdown are now only a few seconds! Thank you, HDFan!