Diagnosing slow Mac OS X shutdown

My MacBook Pro used to shutdown in about 6 seconds. Now it takes over 40. I've added and removed a lot of software over time and am wondering if there are shutdown procedures being run where the software doesn't exist (resulting in a long search for shutdown programs that ultimately fail). Could someone tell me the filename and directory of the file that calls other scripts to shutdown? I'd like to take a look at this file to see if there's stuff in it that shouldn't be there. Alternative a shutdown log (if such a thing exists) would be helpful too.

 

I did some digging around and apparently the slow shutdown is a known problem with Parallels. I found others with this problem that had installed Parallels (free trial). It appears that just tossing the application isn't enough. It leaves bits around that consume shutdown elapsed time. One of the workarounds involves reinstalling it and then choosing a deinstall option. I'm giving that a try right now.

 

I found the directions for diagnosing shutdown issues. I uninstalled Parallels and that got the shutdown time down to 24 seconds. I then found that the shutdown issues were displaylink driver (a USB monitor hardware device that I no longer use), synergy and virtual box. I installed virtual box a long time ago to play with but never used it. I deinstalled virtual box after downloading the kit and that got my shutdown time down to six seconds. That's good enough for me. I may take a stab at the displaylink driver to possibly save another second but six seconds feels very, very good.

 

Check for some other resident 3rd party drivers. I had found an NTFS driver of mine was adding 7-8 seconds to shutdown. By disabling this driver alone, I restored my shutdown time to right around 3 seconds.

 

I removed the displaylink driver and am now down to four seconds. The biggest thing left is synergy and I'd rather leave that up because I frequently use the MacBook Pro in conjunction with desktops at work and home.

I had a look at the startup notifications in /var/log/system.log and there are a number of things in there that I'm wondering about. Some of these seem to take several seconds (on takes about 19 seconds) and it seems that something is waiting for something else. There is also some network stuff going on where the network address is changed around which takes some time. I've seen some google links where these sorts of things are discussed and I may go looking around there one of these days. Getting shutdown time reduced 95% is a pretty big win. It would be nice to tweak the startup too. My startup time is currently 53 seconds from power on. I think that it went up by about ten seconds after installing Snow Leopard. At any rate it would be nice to get some of that time back but no hurry on that one.

 

What Synergy App are you using? I'm using SynergyKM my shut down isn't incredibly long. (I haven't timed it, but I usually shut down with out closing everything, even then it's not that long.)

 

I'm using the open source synergy application that allows you to use multiple computers with on keyboard/mouse. The shutdown doesn't take long - it's the startup that I'm looking at.

 

How are you measuring the startup time? My 17-inchers average 40 seconds from prodding the power switch to the logon screen.

 

Open /var/log/system.log in a text editor.

 

I just installed the latest version of SynergyKM and it fixes a problem with preferences that broke when I installed Snow Leopard. I'm hoping that this improves startup performance too. I'll get around to reviewing the system log one of these days.

 

I removed SynergyKM from autostartup and that shaves a lot of time from startup. I don't use SynergyKM when my MBP is mobile (obviously) so I think that I will just turn it on manually when I'm in a place where I use it.

The other startup applications that I looked at were taking minimal time so the only other thing that I could do to save time would be to mess around with fonts. My startup is about 30 seconds now which is good enough.