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  • Symptom 1: After selecting region, the OS setup UI froze, I’ve researched, went back (took some time for UI to respond, like minutes), and continued setup, no slowness after that point (might have been a wifi issue, or region bug, however the UI was extremely slow, the Next buttons didn't respond etc.)

  • Symptom 2: The machine froze after an initial login, there was a loader UI, the loader bar froze at 50%, the cursor disappeared, a forced shutdown + start fixed the issue (the initial restart was triggered after installing logitech gaming software)

  • Symptom 3: At each restart, during sign in, the keyboard/mouse responded very slowly, it took around 15 seconds for the password input to gain text focus, moving around mouse left cursor trails, like a lot of mouse cursors on the login UI, which disappeared after a while

  • Symptom 4: After removing an external USB sound card, uninstalling the Logitech gaming software, now there is only the initial slowness and ±10 second password input focus delay.

During/After all these, the machine responded well to stress tests, and there is no slowness during normal usage, this a fresh MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014, Model 11,3) with 512GB SSDs/NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M. The CPU/SSD performs well at benchmarks.

I’m thinking the initial slowness might be normal. It takes 90 seconds for me to reach the desktop after a restart, 20 seconds to boot, 10 seconds to apple logo, 5 seconds to login UI, around a minute to login with the delays.

However I want to be sure there are no hardware issues, as I had my share of hardware issues in the past, and it might be logical to return this MacBook if it is indeed a hardware issue.

(The battery was also problematic/not charging like all stale MacBooks but a SMC reset solved the issue)

I've just tested a shutdown + cold start, the login UI appeared after <20 seconds, and there was no password focus delay, so it's a pretty non-deterministic issue

As an extra information, CPU overload might be the cause of the initial issue, as I see the initial 100% spike from Activity Monitor.

Sleep, Wake cycles are instantaneous, only Restart/Start seems to be problematic

After using the machine for 2 days, the performance issue disappeared, the startups became faster, I'm still wondering what might have caused the initial initial slowness issues, the Symptom 1 might have been a setup bug, I'm guessing the other symptoms might have been software issues or initial encryption related etc, but I'm guessing the initial encryption was completed right after the setup

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  • it ships with 16gb rams as standard, it's more of an OS or hardware (probably not the ram or the cpu) issue, or nothing
    – Kaan Soral
    Nov 5, 2014 at 0:06
  • Just an idea: Have you setup a Time Machine backup or similar? It might have taken it 2 days of very partial time up to copy the entire disk.
    – harrymc
    Nov 7, 2014 at 11:04
  • Unfortunately no, but after thinking about the issue for a while, I also suspect it was a similar resource issue, something that bursted all resources at startup, enough to cause the cursor to leave marks
    – Kaan Soral
    Nov 7, 2014 at 14:46

2 Answers 2

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+50

The article Mac Slow After Yosemite Update? Fix It offers the following solutions, one of which you might have carried-out without thinking of it as a solution, which could explain the improvement after 2 days :

  1. Free space on the disk if low
  2. Repair Disk Permissions
  3. Run Mac System Resets
  4. Turn Off Transparency Effects
  5. Lighten up the Notification Center Workload
  6. Turn Off File Vault Encryption
  7. Clean re-install of Yosemite as a last resort

Otherwise, I would imagine that after the upgrade to Yosemite, OSX required some maintenance work, or to regenerate some internal database, which caused an overload on computer resources.

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  • Looking through the list and considering the things I did, it's highly probable one of them, or something else like that might have happened, I also see an initial burst of the "mds_stores" process, hits 150%'s initially, then cools off, without causing issues now, it could have caused issues initially, research tells it's a spotlight process
    – Kaan Soral
    Nov 7, 2014 at 23:45
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    It's entirely possible that mds_stores was busily indexing the contents of the hard disk, but you didn't leave the computer on and unattended long enough for it to complete the task, the reason being that the computer was too annoyingly slow. Therefore it took two real-time days to finish.
    – harrymc
    Nov 8, 2014 at 9:37
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This sounds like it could be one the following or even something else...

The Hard Drive could have issues and after shipping and possibly being bounced around this would not surprise me. It could be a bad system image, meaning from the factory the version of software may have issues or that particular install had an issue and it has only gotten worse. Did you try doing a full wipe of the machine and re-installing the newest version of OSX you could and check things again? I have seen this happen with many OEM machines where the image the factory put on had either a bug or that particular install had a small issue while setting up so it is not a system ending bug, but doing a full factory restore and basically installing the OS from scratch fixed everything [be sure to include any and all available updates as it may be a bug with the certain version of OSx on your particular machine that Apple has since learned of and patched with some update.

If that does not work then I am with the others take the thing back, especially as much as Apple has you pay for their devices even if you just feel uncomfortable and would rather try a different machine you should be sure you are happy with what you paid for.

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  • bad system image sounds logical, however the issue persisted after upgrading to osx yosemite (or started after that) - I'm sure the package got bounced plenty during transportation, they almost always do, however since the drive is flash based, I don't think it would do undetectable damage (I think the symptoms would be more severe) - Thanks for your input
    – Kaan Soral
    Nov 7, 2014 at 14:48

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