Speed Up Sleep Mode on MacBooks

Tech blogger Dan Warne notes that MacBooks loaded with serious memory—like MacBook Pros with more than 2 GB—can take a long while to activate these days, since the entirety of that memory is being written to your hard disk in the default "safe sleep." If you're almost always plugged into a wall socket or aren't the type to run your battery down entirely, Warne recomments a one-line Terminal hack that brings back the old swift-moving sleep:

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0

If you change your mind or want safe sleep back, run the same command with a "3" instead of "0" at the end. And, as Warne notes, the SmartSleep option panel can customise this a bit, by having your MacBook only activate safe sleep when it's low on battery power.

1:00 AM on Sat Mar 15 2008
by Kevin Purdy

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by weizilla at 2:39 PM 15/3/08

@eaganj: I think the default is all memory is written to disk and still kept in memory at the same time. Then when you awake, it just reads everything from memory so that's why it's instant. I just got my macbook a few weeks ago and it takes like 10-15 seconds to sleep... as opposed to when I use SmartSleep, it does to sleep instantly. Then again, I have 4gb of ram so it makes a huge difference for me.

weizilla

by r00fus at 11:00 AM 15/3/08

@benkreeger: 2nd recommendation for smartsleep. It really does work.
Idea is: when battery is low, you sometimes do want to be able to hibernate/sleep, but most of the times you don't.
Smartsleep does this, and it has yet to fail me.

r00fus

by eaganj at 7:46 AM 15/3/08

Has Apple changed the default? My MacBook Pro has always automatically gone into regular sleep unless the battery was on the brink of depletion. Then and only then would it go into the long, slow, laborious hibernate process of writing all memory to disk.

Unless the battery ran out while in sleep, my Mac and every other Mac I've seen has been relatively snappy to awaken. (Granted, it's not quite as good as the days of OS X 10.1 when it would be awake by the time the lid was fully open, but still....)

eaganj

by divinity at 6:04 AM 15/3/08

And if you want to automatically hibernate: Make my Macbook Pro Hibernate

divinity

by vreesh at 4:15 AM 15/3/08

it doesn't take a while and hibernate mode 0 is same slow sleeping as in mode 3
look there: [mizine.de]

vreesh

by Deprong Mori at 4:15 AM 15/3/08

I wouldn't be surprised if this worked on all modern Macs. It appears to be a function of the operating system, not the hardware.

Deprong Mori

by ctoa at 3:05 AM 15/3/08

Works on a Macbook too. Not just on a Macbook Pro. I just love the fact how fast my macbook sleeps and wakes up almost instantly all the time.

ctoa

by benkreeger at 3:05 AM 15/3/08

I love SmartSleep. I used to use this terminal command but it kept getting reset every other day or so. SmartSleep is my saving grace.

benkreeger