Takes a long time for my macbook pro to wake from sleep

Question

Ever since I first started using my brand new Macbook pro (mountain lion, 10.8.2) it has taken a long time for it to wake up from sleep (several minutes). When I open the macbook it first shows a grayed out picture of the screen with a count at the bottom (as if the battery was run out, which it is not) then the picture gets clear and the count is done, but still I have to wait 1-2 minutes before I can move the mouse.

It was the same with both 8 GB RAM and 4 GB RAM.

What is wrong?

Thank you for your help

Answer 1

The greyed out (and blurred) background with the progress bar indicates that your computer hibernated (as opposed to suspended) - meaning it dumps the memory state to disk, and when resuming needs to restore that memory state from disk to memory.

To check which sleep mode your computer is using run the following from a terminal:

pmset -g | grep hibernatemode

If it is 1, this would be the expected behavior. If it is 3, OS X is unable to resync the memory state from background tasks (such as time machine) and may fully restore the memory state from disk. If it is 0, the memory shouldn't have been dumped to disk during normal sleep which would indicate that it hibernated as a last resort before losing power.