Mac OS X 10.3.6 Special Report: Slow Startup: Causes, solutions

Some users experience unusually long startup times after updating to Mac OS X 10.3.6.

The startup process, for afflicted users, seems to stall right after login. If automatic login is enabled, the stall occurs at the point right after the Mac OS X desktop appears, but before any icons or menubar items appear.

Typical cases include:

Paul Gary, who writes: "I have a Powerbook G4 17" 1Ghz with 1GB of RAM. Under 10.3.5, the startup time was usually between 30 to 45 seconds. Under Mac OS X 10.3.6, the startup time is well over two minutes. Despite repairing permissions and removing startup items, the system continued to load slowly, with the beach ball spinning for a long time. Reverting to Mac OS X 10.3.5 returned boot times around 30 seconds."

Robert Weaver, who writes: "I am experiencing much slower startup times after updating my 12" 1Ghz, 768 RAM Powerbook to Mac OS X 10.3.6. The longest delay is after the desktop picture appears, then it slowly ads icons to the main menu one at a time and finally finishes. It used to start in less than 1 minute, now is more than two minutes."

Adam Ismail adds: "There is no delay loading up to the login screen - however once my username and password has been typed in - it takes around about 2 - 2.5 minutes to load compared to about 10 - 15 seconds before the update."

Lous Larouche saw this problem duplicated across an array of more than 100 Macs upgraded to Mac OS X 10.3.6:

"I'm a Computer Technology Teacher in a Canadian High School. We have about 160 Macs running OS 10.3.x. [...] The Macs are eMacs for the most part, iMacs, and iBooks. The point is, I'm running the exact same model on all of them, using tools like ASR, CCC, NetRestore, and Remote Desktop for mass deployment and maintenance.

"After upgrading 2 labs to 10.3.6 using the Remote Desktop's package installer feature with the smallest 10.3.6 upgrade package, all the Macs in those two labs are now plagued by slow startup times. In between the login window, and the desktop appearing you can see the beach ball for up to 2 minutes while you can hear the hard drive rumbling away."

Disable network volume automounts Some users have been able to resolve slow login times by disabling automounting of networked volumes.

Fonts Others users have experienced success cleaning font caches with Font Finagler, though for most, it doesn't seem to provide a significant reduction of startup time:

Some have been able to eliminate the startup lag by simply removing extraneous, non-native fonts from their system using Apple's Font Book (located in the "Applications" folder on a standard Mac OS X installation):

Tom Hughes writes "I also noticed significantly slower startup times after the log-in on my G4 iMac after updating to 10.3.6.

"I was able to bring that start-up time from 2 minutes back to 15 seconds by cleaning out 'Font Book' back to its default fonts.

"Create a new user, determine the 'Font Book' default fonts, then go back to the original user and clean out 'Font Book' using that list as a guide. Be careful not to toss any of the default fonts since the system needs some of them to run properly.

Fonts can be removed using the "Remove Font" menu item inside Font Book. Also, make sure all default fonts are all reactivated or you will not be able to activate "Accounts" in "System preferences".

AppleScript Yvan Koenig, a poster to Apple's Discussion Boards, has submitted an AppleScript that deletes several files implicated in increased startup time. The script has been successful for a number of users, and is as follows:

property systemList : {¬
"com.apple.ATS.System.fcache", ¬
"com.apple.ATSServer.FODB_System", ¬
"fontTablesAnnex"}
property localList : {¬
"501:Classic.fcache", ¬
"501:Local.fcache", ¬
"User.fcache", ¬
"Classic.fodb", ¬
"Local.fodb", ¬
"User.fodb", ¬
"FondResourceCache"}
tell application "Finder"
set versionFinder to version as text
end tell
if versionFinder starts with "10.3" then
set localCaches to ((path to "cusr") as text) & "Library:Caches:com.apple.ATS:"
set systemCaches to ((path to "boot") as text) & "System:Library:Caches:"
tell application "Finder"
repeat with name in localList
try
delete file (localCaches & name)
end try
end repeat
repeat with name in systemList
try
delete file (systemCaches & name)
end try
end repeat
end tell
end if

In order to run this script, simply open the application Script Editor (located in Applications/AppleScript on a standard installation), create a new file, paste the above script, click "Compile" then click "Run." You will be asked for your administrator password several times.

Resources

Reverting to Mac OS X 10.3...

Font Finagler

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