Login Time After Restart

MarvinK9

macrumors member

Original poster

Jun 6, 2014

So for a while now my Intel iMac 5k 2017 has a tremendously slow startup/login time. From entering my password it is a few minutes before the display starts to show my desktop (with no background image or dock still). Overall about 20 minutes to a half hour before the system becomes usable, it’s still-opening applications during that time. Before that most attempts at interaction are painfully slow - i.e. “About This Mac” takes 30 seconds to appear, though Launchpad seems to appear fairly quickly. The spinning beachball of death is a frequent visitor. This is only for initial login after a restart. I have plenty of RAM, I’m not automatically re-opening that many apps (Mail, Messages, Safari, maybe 3 more).. but they take forever to launch.
I thought it might be something specific to my system, but a friend with a slightly older model iMac 5k has the same issue. I’m on macOS 13.2, he’s on 12.x.
Does anyone know what’s going on with the abysmal time to get back to work after a restart?

Bigwaff

macrumors regular

Sep 20, 2013

Boot in Recovery Mode (Cmd+R) and use Disk Utility to check your start up disk using First Aid. Does your iMac have a HD, SSD, or Fusion Drive?

MarvinK9

macrumors member

Original poster

Jun 6, 2014

The Mac has a Fusion Drive. I’ve checked the startup disk while not in recovery mode and it shows no issues.
I’ll try recovery mode soon when I feel like enduring the wait.

I did beta test Ventura and I was forced to use recovery mode a couple times with it as the earlier installers would fail on the first attempt. I did disk tests a couple times then just to be sure it wasn’t my system causing issues.

Bigwaff

macrumors regular

Sep 20, 2013

Certainly sounds like the Fusion Drive is the culprit. Back up now! Install macOS on an external SSD and boot from it. My guess is your computer will feel snappy again. If so, you’ve got two choices, replace the internal Fusion drives with a single SSD drive (expensive option unless you can perform the install yourself) or migrate your system and data to the external SSD via the backup and boot from the external SSD drive from now on.

MarvinK9

macrumors member

Original poster

Jun 6, 2014

What exactly makes you think the Fusion Drive is the culprit? Why would a failing Fusion Drive only affect login time and be otherwise undetectable? Or is there a test that I could easily do that will confirm this idea? Is this failure so common that both me and my friend are affected by it?
I do have Time Machine backups.

Bigwaff

macrumors regular

Sep 20, 2013

MarvinK9 said:

Or is there a test that I could easily do that will confirm this idea?

Boot from an external drive as suggested… but I guess “easily” is subjective. Booting from the external drive is one way to test whether your Fusion Drive is the culprit. Since you have Time Machine backup, you could also boot into Recovery and reformat your Fusion drive, then restore from Time Machine backup. If performance still slow then external drive maybe the next option.

Google search “Fusion Drive slow boot” and you will discover lots of posts, etc related to the phenomenon.

PBG4 Dude

macrumors 601

Jul 6, 2007 4,033 4,048

You could set up a new user account and see if the new user has the same extended login experience.

sparkhill

macrumors regular

Oct 27, 2010

It is almost certainly a failed Fusion Drive. I had the exact same issues on two different Macs and and have been running off an external SSD for a while now. Fusion Drive is a common failure point, especially a few years out.

MarvinK9

macrumors member

Original poster

Jun 6, 2014

I have no doubts that reinstalling the OS on a new SSD will improve the situation. But I would like to confirm some kind of Fusion Drive failure rather than rely on anecdotes. I too have an anecdote that my friend that does not have a Fusion Dive is experiencing the same slow down. So far there are no other indicators and I’m trying to understand what the failure mechanism is. I have not heard of an SSD becoming significantly slower. I’m aware that writes on a full SSD are slower, but isn’t the point of the SSD in a Fusion Drive to actually use all that space for frequently read files? Nor does a HDD slow down (other than due to fragmentation), without actual read/write errors clearly happening. Since a Fusion Drive is just some fancy caching algorithms on top of these standard devices - what is it that is actually “failing” ? Surely there would be something in a log file somewhere if things were legit “failing”?
Basically the slowdown to me appears to be a software issue with newer versions of macOS. I’m not aware of any way to make it this slow without doing something dumb.

Bigwaff

macrumors regular

Sep 20, 2013

Basically the SSD component of your Fusion Drive has “worn out” and can no longer efficiently write data to the drive, hence the sluggishness.

Your understanding of how a Fusion Drive works is cursory. Excellent write up -

How long will the SSD (in my Fusion Drive) last?

How long will the SSD in your Mac last before it fails? Some seem to be going to an early grave. Is yours?

eclecticlight.co

Fishrrman

macrumors Penryn

Feb 20, 2009 25,913 10,759

I agree with other assessments above about one portion of the fusion drive that may be failing (usually the hard disk portion).

What I'd do at this point is get a modestly-sized SSD (such as a 1tb Samsung t7), and make it "the new boot drive".

It will give "quite good" performance when plugged into one of the USBc ports on the back. I'd expect to see read speeds up around 800MBps (or even better).

You didn't tell us WHAT SIZE the fusion drive is.

If it's 1tb you could just use SuperDuper (free to download and use for this purpose) to "clone over" the contents of the fusion drive to the SSD. Then set the SSD to be the new boot drive in the startup disk preference pane.

Alternative:
Install a new copy of the OS onto the SSD, then "migrate stuff manually".

As to what (specifically) is "failing" on the fusion drive?
It could be different factors.
- bad sectors on the HDD
- bad actuating arm on the HDD
- something else on the HDD
- something with the SSD

It doesn't really matter.
You're going to have to do something about it, anyway.
Have you run disk utility's "first aid" on it?
What does it say?

Fastest/easiest/cheapest workaround is (again) to start booting from an external SSD.

MarvinK9

macrumors member

Original poster

Jun 6, 2014

2TB Fusion Drive - yes I have run DiskUtility First Aid. I think it might have found a couple allocation issues the first time, but nothing crazy, it's fine.

I tired to download DriveDx (mentioned in the article above) but the download link is not working.

DiskUtil shows no issues with the raw SSD or HDD - but I'm not sure that it ever would:

Code:

diskutil info /dev/disk0
   Device Identifier:         disk0
   Device Node:               /dev/disk0
   Whole:                     Yes
   Part of Whole:             disk0
   Device / Media Name:       APPLE SSD SM0128L


   Volume Name:               Not applicable (no file system)
   Mounted:                   Not applicable (no file system)
   File System:               None


   Content (IOContent):       GUID_partition_scheme
   OS Can Be Installed:       No
   Media Type:                Generic
   Protocol:                  PCI-Express
   SMART Status:              Verified


   Disk Size:                 121.3 GB (121332826112 Bytes) (exactly 236978176 512-Byte-Units)
   Device Block Size:         4096 Bytes


   Media OS Use Only:         No
   Media Read-Only:           No
   Volume Read-Only:          Not applicable (no file system)


   Device Location:           Internal
   Removable Media:           Fixed


   Solid State:               Yes
   Virtual:                   No
   Hardware AES Support:      No

Code:

diskutil info /dev/disk1
   Device Identifier:         disk1
   Device Node:               /dev/disk1
   Whole:                     Yes
   Part of Whole:             disk1
   Device / Media Name:       APPLE HDD ST2000DM001

   Volume Name:               Not applicable (no file system)
   Mounted:                   Not applicable (no file system)
   File System:               None

   Content (IOContent):       GUID_partition_scheme
   OS Can Be Installed:       No
   Media Type:                Generic
   Protocol:                  SATA
   SMART Status:              Verified

   Disk Size:                 2.0 TB (2000398934016 Bytes) (exactly 3907029168 512-Byte-Units)
   Device Block Size:         512 Bytes

   Media OS Use Only:         No
   Media Read-Only:           No
   Volume Read-Only:          Not applicable (no file system)

   Device Location:           Internal
   Removable Media:           Fixed

   Solid State:               No
   Virtual:                   No
   Hardware AES Support:      No

SMART status is good for both.

The SSD not being able to efficiently *write* data during boot up when most operations are reads seems a bit odd. And I still can't find any reference to SSDs slowing down so much as they wear. Only as they fill - and since Apple is managing how much of the SSD portion of a Fusion drive gets used, they should keep it within reasonable limits. I.e. it would still be their fault if that was the issue.

And nobody has an answer to why this is observed on a friend's system that doesn't have a fusion drive. With no indicators that there are any read/write failures happening. 1/2h to finish booting has never been reasonable even for a full HDD system.

I personally think everything points to a design decision by Apple to optimize *only* for SSDs in later versions of macOS and APFS, at the expense of absolutely abysmal performance for HDDs, combined with a failure to effectively utilize the SSD as the drive fills. Still zero evidence for any sort of hardware failure.

Bigwaff

macrumors regular

Sep 20, 2013

I was being somewhat cheeky by using the term "worn out". Basically, data has been written to the SSD over and over and over... For example, if you regularly use applications which require large amounts of memory beyond your system's physical RAM (audio/video editing applications), then portions (could be significantly large portions) of application memory will be written to disk (i.e. your SSD). This is called swapping. A system which consistently has to swap will constantly be reading/writing from/to disk. This type of scenario can shorten the life of an SSD significantly.

The article I referenced in my earlier post explains the mechanics of SSD lifespan management quite clearly. Your friend either has an SSD experiencing a similar decline or a hard drive that is exceedingly fragmented.

MarvinK9

macrumors member

Original poster

Jun 6, 2014

I understand swapping and virtual memory (I have a degree in Computer Engineering). The iMac in question has 40GB of RAM and it would rarely if ever need to swap with my typical usage.

My friend (also a Computer Engineer) does not have an SSD in his iMac. Fragmentation of the HDD would effect general performance, not just boot time. It’s the initial login/booting that is excessively slow, after that 1/2h of pain the system is quite usable.

I repeat, there is no indication of SSD failures actually happening. No logs, no SMART status, nothing going wrong after the initial login finally stabilizes.

Bigwaff

macrumors regular

Sep 20, 2013

And both you and your friend experience slow boot times when booting from an external drive as well?

MarvinK9

macrumors member

Original poster

Jun 6, 2014

I tried with an external HDD that had macOS 11.x. (Might be the same OS as my friend). It was certainly not fast, though maybe not quite as slow. That copy of macOS would be fairly “unused”. I think it was nearly 4 minutes after entering the password before I started to see notifications appear. I will try it again today, after it has installed the latest macOS 11.x and synchronized iCloud content, just in case that might have slowed it down more than normal.

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