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Question

macOS Updates Taking A Long Time

  • August 31, 2022
  • 3 replies
  • 37 views
L
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Hey Everyone,

I've noticed with macOS Big Sur and Monterey that my Macs are taking an unusually long time to prepare an OS update before restarting and installing. I'm talking about a minimum of 45 minutes up to almost 2 hours sometimes. Yesterday on a Mac running 12.4 it took almost two hours to prep the installation from the software update panel to 12.5.1 before restarting. 

All of my Macs are FV2 enabled with a 50/50 mix of 2021 M1 Pros and 2019-2020 Intel's. Am I just not used to the new normal or is something going on here I'm missing? 

    3 replies

    sdagley
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    • sdagley
    • Jamf Heroes
    • August 31, 2022

    @Levi_ Do you have any sort of Anti Virus software installed in your environment? There's a _lot_ of file system activity during an upgrade and AV software will adversely impact install times.

    mvu
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    • mvu
    • Jamf Heroes
    • August 31, 2022

    I've seen something similar at two different organizations in the past. For one of them, I had to talk to network team.

    Are your Macs hardwired or connected to VPN? Can you take one Mac and jump off the company network; use a different network (public or home connection)?

     

    L
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    • Levi_
    • Author
    • Valued Contributor
    • August 31, 2022

    Hey @sdagley Yes we do and I have seen disk usage in the activity monitor climb to about 4GB in read during the process but after it hits that read amount it doesn't climb any higher. I apologize I should have mentioned this that's my fault. After it hits the 4GB in read though it doesn't continue to climb so I assume it's done with scanning the files.

    Hey, @mvu Almost all of my Mac users are WFH and a good number of them do not utilize the VPN. This is a good call, but does this impact the installation's speed after downloading the update? I'm not sure if the Mac talks back to Apple while installing files.

    Thank you guys for helping so far these are good places to look at. I'm used to advertising the update can take up to 30-45 minutes to install once the Mac restarts. I want to get an update in the update process to include this add up to 2 hours to pre-install the update but man that's rough. The bigger problem I'm staring down right now is the eventual upgrade to Ventura when it arrives. I use the popular "One Click Erase Your Mac" process to perform clean installations of macOS when I need to redeploy and I also use it for in-place upgrading of deployed Macs. During the Major OS update process I black out the screen so users just can't restart their machine to avoid upgrading and it looks cleaner. With it taking so long I've reverted to the window upgrade notification so it doesn't black their screen out for two whole hours and some users just restart their machine to avoid it for the day until they get caught in the policy the next day.

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