The macOS 10.13 High Sierra running slow on APFS

same here, but I’m not sure it’s APFS or just the new OS or testing code...

How long have you had 10.13 installed?

My mid 2014 MBP was running a little slow the first couple of days, it must have been due to the background process after first instal, now its running great.

Yes, even though I freshly installed on an external drive, and converted it, the OS still needed to fill its Spotlight database after booting. It appears to use as many as four processor cores for four scanning processes until this completes.

I did not upgrade an existing macOS installation to High Sierra. Instead I created a new APFS partition and installed High Sierra on it.

I also experienced slowness in this configuration after installation. I then tried a manual reboot to see if it helps, but the boot itself does not complete. I never get to the login screen.

For now, I have switched to High Sierra running on HFS+ and have not seen this problem there

> … configuration …

Hard disk drive or solid state?

In my case it is a HDD

With a Seagate hard disk drive on USB 2.0 with a MacBookPro8,2, verbose mode, I find that booting from build 17A264c of 10.13 with APFS is much slower than booting the other systems (10.9.5, 10.12.5) on the same disk with HFS Plus.

Almost certainly much slower working with applications.

With a different hard disk drive, given entirely to a clean installation of 17A264c:

• booting with HFS Plus took around 90 seconds (between the start of verbosity and appearance of the login dialogue)
• after conversion to APFS, around 210 seconds.

Still with 17A264c I used fdesetup(8) to enable FileVault. Restarted a few times, during and after migration, performed measurements. The final boot before the update to 17A291j was comparably time consuming. In detail:

• 17:59:00 – unlocked
• 17:59:06 – early boot began
• 18:00:07 – early boot complete, system boot began
• 18:02:59 – on-screen verbosity ended, grey screen and progress bar began
• 18:03:50 – desktop background appeared
• 18:06:12 – clock appeared in the menu bar.

I converted on the 7th. MacBook Pro Retina 2012. 768GB SSD 16GB. For the first 6 days or so, things were slow and the fans would come on constantly. Then it finally settled. BTW, I did do an SMC reset. Now it runs cool and fast.

Hi grahamperrin,

Thank you for the question. I think this is the reason for slowness also. I actually have a 1TB HDD and not a SSD. Since APFS is designed to run faster on SSD, it might run slow on normal hard disk.

Kind Regards

Alok