Ever since I got my Macbook Pro I’ve experienced the slow wake up issue. It is by far the most annoying persistent problem with the MBP. Here’s the solution:
- Install SmartSleep. This adds a new pane to your System preferences that allows you to tweak the underlying system settings.
- Set the current sleep state to “smart sleep”, and the Sleep / Hibernate level to 20. This means when the battery is at 20% go into hibernate mode instead of sleep mode.
- Done. After installing this I haven’t had the slow wake up problem anymore.
Here’s why the problem happens in the first place. There are four states the MBP can be in: on, off, sleep and hibernation. In hibernation the contents of your RAM are written to the disk. Check out /var/vm, you’ll see a file called sleepimage that is exactly the same as size as the RAM in your system.
When Apple released the MBP they included a new feature called SafeSleep which for battery swapping reasons writes every byte of your RAM to disk when the battery is swapped. This is a cool feature but really annoying if you want to get to work and have to wait a few minutes for your machine to come out of hibernation.
Since about 2005 the default mode was to go into sleep mode (keeping the RAM powered) and also writing all RAM contents to disk in case of a power failure (battery removal). This of course increases the time it takes for the computer to get to sleep as well as the time for it to wake up. I don’t know why it would affect the wake up time but it just does. :)
Being the adventurous type I prefer to use Mode 0, which is keep RAM powered, don’t write anything to the disk. The downside of this is that if I ever remove my battery I’d lose everything that was running when my computer wakes up. However, using SmartSleep helps a bit here.
SmartSleep can dynamically tweak the sleep mode settings based on your battery’s charge. If your battery has a greater than 20% charge it will use Mode 0. If it has less than that it will adjust your system so that it hibernates. Very cool.
My sources for this information:
- Make my Macbook Pro Hibernate
- Fixing Macbook Pro Sleep Problems
- SmartSleep - System preference pane for adjusting the sleep mode. Get it!
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You forgot to mention that SmartSleep is free as in beer. Very cool. Personally what I’d want is a Hibernate drop down menu item in the Finder. I wish Apple would do that for us!