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I have a late-2010 MacBook Air and I've been experiencing pretty slow shutdown times recently. I know that there's always the "how often do you shutdown your computer?" argument but I see that as invalid because throughout the life of this laptop it has thus far had a roughly 3-5 second shutdown time. My concern is that the slow shutdown time is an early warning sign that the SSD is beginning to fail, or that there is some other component that is beginning to fail.

As an experiment I created a new user and performed a shutdown with that account and the slow shutdown issue persisted.

I also have FileVault enabled, but I disabled it and the shutdown time was the same.

For comparison, the boot time has remained roughly the same since I bought it. Fresh from the box it had an 18 second off-to-browsing time, and now that time is about 24 seconds counting the time it takes for me to enter the password and fire up Safari.

I was thinking it could be an application that is causing the issue, but I have no idea how to diagnose that other than uninstalling everything one app at a time to see.

If it's important, here is a list of installed apps, just in case anyone knows of an issue caused by any of these:

Wunderkit Office for Mac iWork (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) Xcode Photoshop, InDesign, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, AfterEffects, Contribute - All CS5 Wunderlist MySQL Workbench Symantec EndPoint Protection (completely disabled and not running, just installed because it has to be for work) Firefox, Opera, and Chrome NVAlt Filezilla

That's all the non-apple software that's installed.

Is it possible to somehow inspect the shutdown process, like booting in verbose mode as is suggested here: MacBook Air has suddenly become very slow at booting and shutdown

Any help is appreciated

specs

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Edit - March 13, 2012

I finally had time to try a reboot and this time it took a long time again (sometimes it is slow and sometimes it's nearly instant, which is what is making this hard to track down).

Anyway, I grabbed the following from my system.log between the shutdown and BOOT_TIME:

Mar 13 23:37:23 MyLaptop [0x0-0x1f91f9].com.apple.iTunes[2323]: Parent: Error or timeout on select
Mar 13 23:37:23 MyLaptop [0x0-0x1f91f9].com.apple.iTunes[2323]: Child with pid 2548 exited normally
Mar 13 23:37:23: --- last message repeated 1 time ---
Mar 13 23:37:23 MyLaptop [0x0-0x1f91f9].com.apple.iTunes[2323]: ATHostConnectionDestroy 0x7fe5f53e3010
Mar 13 23:37:25 MyLaptop com.apple.launchd.peruser.501[139] ([0x0-0x125125].com.apple.iCal[1410]): Exited: Killed: 9
Mar 13 23:37:25 MyLaptop mds[65]: (Error) Server: ==== XPC handleXPCMessage XPC_ERROR_CONNECTION_INVALID
Mar 13 23:37:25 MyLaptop com.apple.launchd.peruser.501[139] ([0x0-0xe00e].com.apple.iTunesHelper[187]): Exited: Killed: 9
Mar 13 23:37:25 MyLaptop com.apple.launchd.peruser.501[139] ([0x0-0x22022].com.apple.AppleSpell[260]): Exited: Killed: 9
Mar 13 23:37:25 MyLaptop com.apple.launchd.peruser.501[139] (com.apple.quicklook[2414]): Exited: Killed: 9
Mar 13 23:37:25 MyLaptop com.apple.launchd.peruser.501[139] ([0x0-0x236236].com.apple.ImageCaptureExtension2[2549]): Exited: Killed: 9
Mar 13 23:37:25 MyLaptop com.apple.launchd.peruser.501[139] (com.apple.mdworker.pool.0[1777]): Exited: Terminated: 15
Mar 13 23:37:25 MyLaptop loginwindow[67]: DEAD_PROCESS: 67 console
Mar 13 23:37:25 MyLaptop loginwindow[67]: LWCASProcessNotificationManager UNEXPECTED NOTIFICATION of type: kLSNotifyLaunchFinished
Mar 13 23:37:25 MyLaptop airportd[2596]: _doAutoJoin: Already associated to “network_wifi”. Bailing on auto-join.
Mar 13 23:37:25 MyLaptop com.apple.kextd[10]: Error reconsidering volume /private/var/folders/07/n5qt65lx44j5y4s7zg2_nv3w0000gn/T/NVProtectedEditingSpace.
Mar 13 23:37:25 MyLaptop shutdown[2599]: halt by Zac: 
Mar 13 23:37:25 MyLaptop shutdown[2599]: SHUTDOWN_TIME: 1331696245 696702
Mar 13 23:37:25 MyLaptop UserEventAgent[11]: CaptiveNetworkSupport:UserAgentDied:139 User Agent @port=29463 Died
Mar 13 23:37:25 MyLaptop imagent[166]: Quit - notifying about shutdown

Is the "error reconsidering volume" part of the trouble?

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  • I didn't mention how slow the shutdown time is - nearly a minute! I've timed it several times and it ranges from 54 seconds to almost 70
    – Zrb0529
    Commented Feb 25, 2012 at 17:07
  • A few things to look for. 1) Look through your User Diagnostic Reports and System Diagnostic reports for stall reports. These indicate that OS X had trouble with a process and did not shut it down in a timely manner. Unfortunately, Apple has said they don't interfere with these; they are expected behavior. 2) make sure no other device is plugged into your Mac (external hard drives, etc.). You should reboot and reset your PRAM by holding ALT + CMD + P + R. The log entries you posted don't appear out of the ordinary (or to be causing your issues).
    – user10355
    Commented Mar 14, 2012 at 8:48

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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Yes, the "error reconsidering volume" is the problem. You were (are) running Notational Velocity with encryption on, the volume is a RAM disk created by that app. Apparently, there is no way to unmount a RAM disk in Mac OS X.

More info:

https://github.com/scrod/nv/wiki/NVProtectedEditingSpace https://github.com/scrod/nv/issues/232

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My guess would be that some process is not quitting when the system tells it to. After about a minute, the system forcibly kills it.

Use the Console utility to check your system.log. Look at the entries around the time of a shutdown for messages indicating that an app is not shutting down as it should. These would most likely be generated by com.apple.launchd or SystemStarter. Also look for the keywords SIGINT or SIGKILL, which is what the system would use to terminate a process which is not cooperating with shutdown.

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