Reduce a mac’s startup time
Streamline a Mac mini to make it start up faster
A software-only look into what’s slowing down an ageing Mac
You can’t improve something if you can’t measure it, so my first step was to time my mini as it started up.
From the initial startup chime to the login window took one minute and 30 seconds. Once I entered my password, I watched the desktop like a hawk and clicked Safari as soon as it appeared in the Dock. It took one minute and 50 seconds for a blank browser page to open and another 26 seconds for my home page (google.co.uk) to load. So that’s two minutes and 16 seconds from login to a working browser. Finally, I clicked the Dropbox icon on the menu bar and timed how long it took for the service to start up and confirm that all my files are synced. I use Dropbox for all my work files, to make sure I can write articles even when I am away from home. That means that I need to wait for Dropbox to start before I can do anything useful. The time from logging in to Dropbox giving me the green light, was a whopping five minutes and 25 seconds. These are my baseline times. Next, I set about seeing what I could do to improve them
Speed superstitions
First, I tried a couple of things that regularly get suggested on the forums. When the 10.10.3 update for Yosemite was released, a lot of people noticed that startup times increased, and one solution was to reselect the startup disk in System Preferences. This made no difference in my case, which didn’t surprise me in the least, but it’s still good to be objective
Anything I hadn’t used recently, or didn’t have a specific use for, got thrown on the bonfire
about these things. Equally, there was no obvious reason why resetting the NVRAM would help either, but I did it anyway. Surprisingly, the time from login to opening Safari did drop by 40 seconds but the next day, starting up from cold, the times had returned to something very close to the baseline values. It’s possible that data stored in NVRAM slows OS X down, but if it rewrites this information every time you clear it, that isn’t much help.
Next I tried a commercial cleanup utility. CleanMyMac 3 (£34.95, macpaw.com) claims to have “powerful scanning that digs up all the junk” and “tools for speeding up your Mac”. It took about half an hour to sift through my 500GB hard disk and find 27GB of junk files that it pronounced ‘safe to delete’. So I deleted them. The time from the startup chime to login screen: exactly the same. The time from login to the Google home page in Safari: 52s slower. Time from login to Dropbox starting: recreated. I had still saved quite a bit of disk space by dumping the other 26.9GB of junk files, but it wasn’t making my Mac any faster.
Lightening the load
Next came a brutal round of uninstalling apps. Of the exactly 100 apps installed on my mini, I threw out 67 of them. Anything I hadn’t used recently, or didn’t have a specific use for, got thrown on the bonfire. There was no “that might come in handy one day” or “dunno what that is, better leave it”. If I change my mind and want something back later, it’s easy enough to download it again. This freed up another 23GB of disk space, but even better, it gave me a slight speed boost. The time from logging in to opening Safari actually dropped by over 40 seconds, which must be because some of those uninstalled apps had been also unchanged. From this I conclude that some of those ‘junk’ files, though safe to delete, actually contained cached data that was doing something useful. Sure enough, when I ran CleanMyMac3 again straightaway, 135MB of junk files had magically reappeared - presumably the cache files that had been
loading Finder extensions and menu bar widgets at startup.
Emboldened, I turned my sights to widgets, extensions and plug-ins. CleanMyMac3 has a tool that makes these easy to remove, so I went though the list and trashed virtually every one. There were 134 on that pile, including a Growl notification plug-in for NetNewsWire – an RSS reader I haven’t used since about 2004 (kids, ask your parents). Together they only amounted to 546MB of disk space, but many loaded at startup and so were definitely slowing down my Mac. Deleting these was the only thing I tried that actually improved the time from the startup sound to the login window. Granted, it only dropped by 10 seconds, but a speed up is a speed up.
Heavy cloud
The final task was to do something about the Dropbox startup time. Clicking on its menu bar icon reveals it spends the most time ‘Starting’, then ‘Indexing’ and ‘Syncing’. It seems to index and sync even if no files have changed since the last time, so this must also include the time taken to scan each file and see if they do in fact need to be indexed and synced at all.
Dropbox’s folder contained 20 years of writing – more than 17,000 files, using 3.25GB. Clearing out the stuff for mags I don’t write for any more plus articles over a year old pruned it by 2GB and over 13,000 files. These older files can go in cloud storage elsewhere to keep them accessible, but it needn’t be a service that continuously syncs with all my devices. On the next restart, Dropbox took 22 minutes to reindex and sync one final time. After that, it dropped below three minutes.
Total startup time – from power-on to all kernel extensions running – has gone from five minutes and 25 seconds to three minutes. Disk space is up 52GB, so backups will be quicker. Best of all, no hardware changes were needed. And the two-and-a-half minutes saved each morning might just let me put up with another year out of this Mac before I finally replace it.