macOS Catalina 10.15.1 suffers from extremely high application start up time After I reboot my computer, it will take a really long time to start up applications (e.g. chrome, pdfexpert) for the first time, maybe about 15~30 seconds. This delay disappears with subsequent re-opening of these apps, which takes less than 1 second.

I am using macOS Catalina 10.15.1 installed in APFS-encrypted mode, and my device is MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Late 2013).

I wonder to know if the problem is that, my device is almost outdated and has no specific hardware like dedicated chips to do decryption, which then leads to an extremely high app loading time for the first time?
How to profile and debug it? 

More, is there any way to migrate the file system to unencrypted version without pains?

One more thing, in macOS Catalina 10.15.0, the delay of app's first start up time is also perceptible, but not as high as now's. So maybe there are some hardware problems with my device?

Thanks a lot.



I installed macOS Catalina from clean slate, which means I made a bootable u disk to install the system after erasing the full disk on macbook pro. The apps are all up-to-date.

My laptop is the 13-inch one in late 2013, which is upgraded to i7-4558U and 16G RAM. It has a 256G SSD with about 200G unused.
Your Late 2013 MacBook Pro does indeed have the integrated decryption functionality in hardware. It is not too old for that. It is integrated in your CPU.

So that solves the riddle of whether or not the slow app loading times are related to not having that - it isn't.

You can disable the encryption of the file system "without pains" by opening up System Preferences => Security &amp; Privacy => FileVault and click "Turn Off FileVault..". I'm pretty sure it won't help your application loading times though.

Note that disabling FileVault takes a long time. It runs in the background so you can continue to use the Mac, but it will be slightly less performant during that time.