Since about Version 6 it has taken longer and longer to start up Mathematica. In Version 10 on my HP Pavilion HPE Series it takes a little over a minute. Is this common experience? Is there some way to decrease this time? Does it have any thing to do with virus checking?

I guess that one possible solution is to just leave the Mathematica FrontEnd open all the time, say by keeping the Documentation Center open but minimized.

Earlier this year I installed an SSD. See my 73 minute YouTube SSD install video. Previously, when I used a Seagate 7200 RPM HDD as the system drive, my system was incredibly slow. I had to wait for everything, including the audio drivers, to load. Now, with my SSD, everything loads extremely fast. My Windows 7-64 bit, i7, 16 GB RAM, system boots in about 30 seconds. I haven't timed it in awhile.

I just installed Mathematica 10.0.2 today. I am basically a new Mathematica user, rarely using previous versions 8 and 9. I have not loaded any extras for M10. This fresh install loads the main screen in about 8 seconds, even if I include the time for getting past the Welcome Screen.

I do have Norton Internet Security 2013 running. To make sure NIS does not affect my timings, I take the precaution of pre-loading NIS by right-clicking on the NIS icon in the TaskBar and clicking "Load Norton Internet Security." NIS does not immediately load when booting up and it does take a few seconds.

Also, while I do have a SanDisk Extreme II 480GB SATA 6.0 Gbit/s installed, the motherboard Intel controller is actually a SATA II 3 Gbit/s controller. However, I don't believe this affects my speed by much. See my YouTube video above. My SanDisk Extreme II, which I bought a year ago, is the previous generation. The latest generation is the SanDisk Extreme PRO 480GB SATA 6.0GB/s. I highly recommend anyone replace their HDD with an SSD. You don't realize just how slow HDD's are, especially with demanding Windows 7-64 and later O/S's, until you upgrade to an SSD. Upgrade your RAM to whatever the maximum amount your Windows and motherboard can handle. If you have a 32 bit Windows O/S, your maximum is probably 4 GB. If you have a 64 bit Windows O/S, you are limited by what your motherboard can handle.

Hi,

I was wondering if there's been any recent activity on this issue? I installed 10.0.1 on a 32-bit Windows 7 PC about a week ago and it worked fine. Today I installed 10.0.2 and it pauses for a long time (over 60 seconds), saying "Initializing kernels..."

Grateful for any ideas!

Thanks.

Hi Ian,

Thanks for that - I've created a dump file, seems to be too big for the Wolfram website to cope with, but will persevere! Thanks again.

Graham

Having similar responsiveness problems running the system on my Windows 8.1 PC. A new notebook opens quickly (<2 seconds) but the system hangs for about 30 seconds before accepting any input.

After the first few characters of input, it then hangs again for 30 seconds while attempting to perform autocomplete.

Disabling Preferences.../enable autocompletion with a popop delay of __ seconds eliminates the hang while typing, and results are generated in an expected amount of time, but does not improve startup time.

I too had the slow startup and "Formatting Notebook Contents" issue on my Lenovo Y580 laptop. I have an NVidia 660M GPU and after updating the drivers to the latest version directly from Nvidia's web site I no longer experience this issue. MMA 10 starts up just as quickly as it does on my desktop. Both machines are running Win 8.1 x64.

Though I have non of the described start-up delays on OSX, I can easily produce this "Formatting Notebook content" popup, that brings MMA 10 down to a halt. Just by opening the help page for "Classify" and then trying to open the "Neat Examples" on that page. It's not an issue for me, but maybe this info helps finding / fixing the problems discussed here.

Matthias

I just found the problem! It's the Classify["Language"... inside the Dynamic. If you've not done a Classify["Language"... before, MMA tries to download the according data from Wolfram's servers. But it somehow seems to cancel / timeout this download when it is inside a Dynamic - ending up in a kind of endless loop. If you just run let's say Classify["Language", "Hallo Welt", "TopProbabilities"] in a notebook first, the according help page will then open with no delay!

Hi Robert,

I am also running Aero, and also Norton Security Suite, and also NVidea graphics. This is true for both my Z800 and for a Lenovo T410S laptop. Both have start-ups of <5seconds. I seem to remember a time when 9 was released when I had a longer start-up, but it's just a vague memory.

--David

Thanks David, the possible USB conflict seems to have been suggested by Wolfram, but it may well be a red herring.

I do have an NVidia GPU, however so far as I'm aware it mainly sits idle, and only runs when a particular application calls it. Maybe it could be the antivirus? I'm running Norton 360. But Norton doesn't raise any warnings about Mathematica. Could it be clashing with Windows' Aero interface or its Windows 8 equivalent? Is anyone running it successfully with Aero? Perhaps it runs OK on the classic 'Windows NT' style desktop that is common in enterprise PCs, where it may have been tested. The problem seems to me be triggered when any new window is opened.

Wild guesses here, but I'm hoping someone can arrive at a solution!

The start up time for Mathematica 10 on my Computer (Intel Xeon E31225 3.10 GHz, Windows 7 64bit) is extremely slow. Takes more than a minute to get the Welcome Screen. It is busy all the time with "Formatting Notebook Contents". It occurs only on one of three similar installations in our group. What is causing this problem? How can I fix it? I need a solution! I installed the latest NVIDIA driver, did a Registry Cleanup, removed and reinstalled Mathematica ... with no success

I noticed that Arnoud Buzing said something about pre-release beta testers, so perhaps I don't need to mention this, but if Wolfram wants to beta a 10.01 (or whatever) release specifically with us slow start-up sufferers, I'm sure we would be happy to help. It wouldn't be good to have a fix-it release that didn't actually fix-it.

Wireless mouse and keyboard (Microsoft wireless desktop receiver 3.1). Win7.

Is the start-up time problem occurring at any time during usage or only after booting the system? During the startup of windows any program is slow. (affected by all sorts of code starting, virus scanner,etc.)

When I stressed the virtual memory of my PC and started M10 then for one time only I saw "Formatting Notebooks."

The result below is after using the system for more than an hour switching between M8 and M10.

{
 {"Initializing kernel connections..." -> 0.078},
 {"Initializing cell styles..." -> 0.219},
 {"Initializing fonts..." -> 0.578},
 {"Initializing menus..." -> 0.593},
 {"Initializing defaults notebook..." -> 0.702},
 {"Initializing defaults clipboards..." -> 0.812},
 {"Initializing internal preferences..." -> 0.843},
 {"Initializing kernels..." -> 0.905},
 {"Opening Welcome Screen..." -> 4.431},
 {"Preloading Favorites..." -> 5.148},
 {"Handling CommandLineOptions..." -> 5.148},
 {"Opening Files..." -> 5.164},
 {"Do Startup Action..." -> 5.164},
 {"Closing Splash Screen..." -> 5.226},
 {"Finished" -> 5.226}
}

David, Julian,

A user interface developer tells me for you to try this:

Options[$FrontEnd, DisableControllers]

This will list your current controllers (usually "GenericDesktop" mouse and keyboard, but possibly different for you.

You can disable all controllers like so, and this may help with the slowness (please let us know if it does):

SetOptions[$FrontEnd, DisableControllers -> All]

If the wireless keyboard/mouse is indeed at fault here, we will include a fix in the next bug fix release.

Note: To reset this option use this:

SetOptions[$FrontEnd, DisableControllers -> Inherited]

(Also, can you let us know what brand/model of wireless keyboard/mouse you are using?)

But wait. If I disable my mouse and keyboard controllers will I still be able to input to the computer?

Julian,

We're always looking for prerelease testers, please do sign up at prerelease@wolfram.com and mention this post.

Possible answer: yes.

At Wolfram's suggestion I removed the wireless USB device that connects my keyboard and mouse to my i3, Windows 7 pro 64-bit machine (since I wasn't able to use a physical keyboard and mouse, I used RDP from Android to connect to the machine)

In the single test I conducted last night following this, startup became "normal", no "formatting notebook" messages appeared and invoking the Welcome Screen from the help menu was also fast again.

Being late, I did not test e.g. autocomplete delay.

If others who have been experiencing this problem find similar results it could be useful to know.

Thank you very much for all your comments.

It looks like the Welcome Screen might not be the only source of delay, but definitely a large contributor.
Follow-up questions, if turning off the Welcome Screen considerably sped up your Mathematica 10's start-up:

a) Is the time it takes to start the Welcome Screen from the menu the same as the time by which the start-up shortened by turning the screen off? (I interpret most of your comments along these lines.)

b) If you close the Welcome Screen and reopen it again via the menu several times (without closing Mathematica inbetween), does the Welcome Screen get faster at opening up or does that time remain the same?

Thank you very much in advance for all your help to get to the root of this problem!

Peter Fleck
Manager, Wolfram Technology Group

Hi Peter,

In answer to a) yes, very similar timing b) 10 open/close Welcome screen timings in seconds: NB figures in () give the time at which the "formatting notebook" message appeared[1].

31.12
30.89
30.67
30.91
30.59 (12.86)
30.41 (12.82)
30.69
30.87 (13.00)
30.85 (13.17)
30.75

All very close, no obvious trend: "by eye" consistent with there being no difference at all (background CPU usage <5%, no significant network activity)., i.e. no, it doesn't seem to get faster here.

[1] which raises the question, what is happening before notebook formatting takes place - as well as why the formatting should also be slow?

i3, 8GB, Win 7 pro, 64-bit.

HTH

Julian

I created boot logs for both a normal Windows 8 startup and a Safe boot. Perhaps a comparison will provide a clue about why my Mathematica 10 startup is almost instantaneous after a safe boot, but takes about a minute after a normal boot:
The normal boot log can be examined here:: dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/30983772/normalbootlog.txt

The save boot log can be examined here: dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/30983772/safebootlog.txt

On a windows machine you can set msconfig to make a boot log and also control how your computer boots.

I also experience hesitations after entering the first two letters of a function. This problem is not severe for me. Let me know if it would be helpful to see the boot log of various kinds of boots, e.g. minimal, alternate shell, active directory repair, network (I'd better find out what happens before I do this, but I think "network" means a save boot with networking).

PS. Why is the community website so slow?

I was having trouble with slow start up, and also the notebook freezing when it was trying to autocomplete symbol/function names (it always froze after entering two letters, seemingly looking up the autocomplete menu, however "strings", numbers etc didn't cause a problem, and evaluation seemed OK).

Unfortunately after several ctrl-shift starts, and quite a few crashes, the kernel wouldn't start because of a licensing error. Furthermore, trying to re-activate the copy via the menus caused a load of notebook error messages. I've had to uninstall it, now looking forward to v10.01!

It's a Win7 laptop, with Intel 4000 HD integrated graphics + NVidia GPU, i7 2.10 GHz CPU, 8GB RAM. Video drivers are up to date. My list of processes are rather too large to fit in a screenshot.

Turning of the Welcome screen also helps tremendously. A factor of 6 again.

In[1]:= Column[FE`Evaluate[FEPrivate`$StartTimes]]

Out[1]= Column[{"Initializing kernel connections..." -> 3.9, 
     "Initializing cell styles..." -> 4.088, 
  "Initializing fonts..." -> 4.244, 
     "Initializing menus..." -> 4.275, 
  "Initializing defaults notebook..." -> 
       4.368, "Initializing defaults clipboards..." -> 4.54, 
     "Initializing internal preferences..." -> 4.587, 
     "Initializing kernels..." -> 6.818, 
  "Opening Welcome Screen..." -> 8.159, 
     "Preloading Favorites..." -> 8.175, 
  "Handling CommandLineOptions..." -> 8.19, 
     "Opening Files..." -> 8.19, "Do Startup Action..." -> 8.19, 
     "Closing Splash Screen..." -> 8.378, "Finished" -> 8.393}, 
   ItemSize -> {Automatic, Automatic}]

The kernel starts in about 1.5 secs.

Re developer suggestions (detailed timings taken for all, but only given for last item; note that in all but safe mode startup, though timings say "finished" after ~30s, MMA is not ready to use until about t=70-90s; in safe mode finished = ready to use more or less)

1. Disconnect network: no change (no wifi or BT, physically unplugged ethernet)
2. Set default printer to XPS etc.: no change (default printer was local, but just in case)
3. Hold down shift during startup: no change
4. Startup in safe mode: huge difference, detailed timings follow

In[1]:= FEEvaluate[FEPrivate$StartTimes]//Column
Out[1]= Initializing kernel connections...->0.577
Initializing cell styles...->0.998
Initializing fonts...->1.575
Initializing menus...->1.638
Initializing defaults notebook...->2.23
Initializing defaults clipboards...->2.776
Initializing internal preferences...->2.87
Checking activation...->2.979
Initializing kernels...->3.868
Opening Welcome Screen...->8.751
Preloading Favorites...->10.046
Handling CommandLineOptions...->10.046
Opening Files...->10.046
Do Startup Action...->10.046
Closing Splash Screen...->10.108
Finished->10.108

If developers are interested in detailed system information e.g. an unhackme log to look for commonalities between systems suffering startup slowness, please let us know where to send them (this would be a bad place to dump such logs)

HTH

from developers, two areas to check:

a) Check if shutting the network down makes any difference. I.e., they could either disable the network adapter under Windows, or put wireless connections into airplane mode, or yank the cable for any wired connections.

b) Another possibility would be to check the default printer. If it is on a network, switch to a local printer. "XPS Document Writer" is a safe default, at least for tests.

=====

Does starting the computer in Safe Mode (by holding down F8 as Windows starts) make a difference?

Does resetting 10.0 FE caches by holding down the SHIFT key as Mathematica starts make a difference?

Desktop Win 7 Pro 64-bit, i3, 8GB

It actually takes about 1.5 minutes for MMA10 to be ready to use, but timings already show t(mma10) >3*t(mma9)... and I could swear MMA9 notebook opening is slower than it was...

I ran FE`Evaluate and got this result:

![enter image description here][1]

Which seems to say that Mathematica 10 is ready to use in less than 10 seconds, but in fact it isn't. The notebook window if frozen for a minute or more. At first, I can't even drag the notebook window. Then, the notebook title bar says "window not responding," and I can't use it. I can move it around, though.

i5 desktop

{
         {"Initializing kernel connections..." -> 0.078},
         {"Initializing cell styles..." -> 0.187},
         {"Initializing fonts..." -> 0.312},
         {"Initializing menus..." -> 0.328},
         {"Initializing defaults notebook..." -> 0.39},
         {"Initializing defaults clipboards..." -> 0.515},
         {"Initializing internal preferences..." -> 0.546},
         {"Initializing kernels..." -> 0.609},
         {"Opening Welcome Screen..." -> 1.389},
         {"Preloading Favorites..." -> 1.981},
         {"Handling CommandLineOptions..." -> 1.981},
         {"Opening Files..." -> 1.981},
         {"Do Startup Action..." -> 2.262},
         {"Closing Splash Screen..." -> 2.262},
         {"Finished" -> 2.262}
        }

Last try at getting this formatted..

Karsten picked -> "Preloading Favorites", "Handling CommandLineOptions", "Opening Files", "Do Startup Action", and "Closing Splash Screen"

Not all 5 are slow. The time displayed must be the total time since startup, not the time for the individual task. Somewhere in there is buried internet connection to check the license.

How about "Preloading Favorites" and "Do Startup Action..." as being the time consumers?

Or

"Opening Welcome Screen..." and "Opening Files..." as the time consumers?

I have the same problem, but only on my Windows 8 laptop. Start-up on my Windows 7 desktop is ok (the laptop significantly faster and has more memory than the desktop). I was a Mathematica 10 beta tester, and I saw this problem from the beginning; it took 5 minutes for the first release to start-up. I sent as much information as i could to Wolfram Research, and they made various suggestions about how to speed up the start-up, but none worked. Each release, however, started a little more quickly than the last. I was helped somewhat by holding down both the shift and control keys while starting Mathematica. That returns various settings in your installation back to zero. The WR guys said this sometimes fixes mysterious problems that no one understands.

I have been able to narrow the start-up problem down to the front end. The kernel starts instantly in a dos box. Most strange that it doesn't show up in Windows 7.

Another observation: the notebook appears almost instantly, but it's frozen and inert for about one minute.

No slowdowns here: version 10.0 starts up in a few seconds under CentOS 7.0 64-bit. Core i5 laptop with 8G RAM, Intel graphics, wireless USB mouse.

The load time is highly dependent on the memory available and the recent history of the machine. Windows has extensive caching logic. My load time can be 1 minute near startup when all sort of background tasks are getting in gear to 2 seconds just after mathematica has been run. Global options have no effect AFAIK. Benchmark your reload time.

The strange thing is that I never had these problems with V9... V10 however is so slow that I cannot work with it anymore. Independent of how many times I open and close it.

I'm using 6GB. Should be enough to run V10. As I said: I never had any problems with V9

Disable Paging Executive.

{light-bulb} This may be a key change. Referring to the history of my machine, I tried an SSD as the system drive. It proved unstable so I went back to an HD. I copied the system image from SSD to HD. The SSD installation software had flipped to "ON" Disable Paging Executive. It is still on.

Sadly, this doesn't work for me..

Here Mathematica starts up in about 5 seconds too

In[1]:= $Version    
Out[1]= "10.0 for Microsoft Windows (64-bit) (June 29, 2014)"

possibly you wish to run a registry cleaner. For years I used to use

but they ceased to exist. This time it found 19 registry errors.

Just to mention it, after a Windows Update day or a switch from one Excel to the next one or from one Visual Studio to the next one, there might remain up to 1300 registry errors which could be cleaned out by a reliable tool of your choice. I have rich colleagues who fear to use a registry cleaner - instead they buy a new computer every couple of years ....

Yes, I also get the Formatting Notebook Contents popup.

I'm struggling with the same problems in Mathematica 10 while Mathematica 9 runs perfectly smooth. The startup in version 10 takes quite a long time and the application freezes from time to time so that I get no response. The documentation center is also very slow. Probably you're right with your suggestion that the Mathematica FrontEnd is the problem here. Already at the startup of version 10 I receive the message : "Formatting Notebook content"...

For me, Win 7 x64 MMA V10, it takes about 5 sec to get to the welcome screen. From there, opening a new notebook is almost instantaneous. I run Norton Security Suite, but I don't know that it's involved in this. --David