Monday 3 March 2008

Slow shutdown

One of the things I noticed after getting my new MBP was how long my old one took to shutdown. For example from the time that I clicked on shutdown to the computer being off it took around 55 seconds. On the new MBP it took around 7 seconds. Just for clarification the install of leopard on my old mbp was a clean install not an upgrade and afterwards I reinstalled all of the applications etc, so it means that either something I have installed since then or something in one of the software updates (not likely) has caused the problem.

On transferring the data/hdd from the old mbp to the new, I also transferred the slow shutdown speed as well and decided to see if I couldnt do something about it or at least determine the cause.

I checked under console and saw that one of the last things that it was trying to do was to allow parallels to close down its network connections etc, so I decided to try uninstalling parallels and see if that made a difference.

Unfortunately in order to uninstall parallels I first had to update it to the current build so that the uninstaller would work, which required a couple of reboots but even after it was uninstalled, there was no change in the shutdown time.

So back to console and this time I notice  a message that the EyeTV helper failed to quit, so I went into activity monitor, quit it manually and tried the shutdown process again and again it took around a minute.

Im going to go have a look in the console again now but I'm really curious what could be causing this...

Any ideas?


3 comments:

Tyler said...

I just picked up the new 2.5 MBP (penryn) and am having the slow shutdown too.

With the stock 2GB of ram, the machine shut down quick and seemed more speedy.

After adding 4GB of ram, shutdown takes about a minute or so and in general, the MBP seems slower. Go figure. BTW the ram test out fine, so I am stumped.

Andrew Proudlove said...

Me too - Im not sure its the ram though because when I installed a HDD with a fresh Leopard install on it, the machine shutdown lightning fast, even with the 4gb of RAM.

It is possible though that its generating a sleep image and obviously it would be logical to expect that a sleep image from 2gb would be faster to create than from 4gb, hence the slowdown.

That doesnt explain totally though why it would shutdown so fast on a clean install with 4gb of ram, so it must also be influenced by something I have installed/done.

Incidentally, you might want to check out the smartsleep software I mention in a post above this one. This prevents the machine from hibernating unless the battery is low, so it essentially doesnt create the sleep image unless it has to.

Thanks for the comment!

Tyler said...

Solved my shutdown issue. Turns out that Tunnelblick was causing my slow shutdown.

Closing it before shutting down results in a normal quick shutdown time.