Apps Launching Slow on Your Macbook Pro?

TL;DR — Many apps on macOS use digital certs that are verified through apple’s certificate services. If Apple’s cert services experience sluggishness, your apps launch slow. A quick fix is to ocsp.apple.com to 127.0.0.1 until Apple’s services come back up to normal levels.

Yesterday, I was noticing some of my apps like WhatsApp were experiencing sluggishness in launching from the doc. Unlike a Windows user who's the answer to every computer problem is…

Stolen from Google Image — being honest! :)

I decided to investigate a little bit and noticed that traffic to Apple’s ocsp.apple.com host is slow.

OCSP stands for Online Certificate Status Protocol and is used by Certificate Authorities to check the revocation status of an X.509 digital certificate.

So I turned off the WIFI and the apps launched as normal. This tells me that Apple’s OCSP checks detect Internet connection and performs the check when it is available. So if you don’t want to disconnect the Internet when Apple’s OCSP is having a bad day, you can just edit the /etc/hosts file and point this domain to localhost:

ocsp.apple.com 127.0.0.1

This effectively makes the check fail faster due to the localhost (127.0.0.1) being the target. It is important to make this temporary entry so make your system work as intended. I would advice that you remove it after your critical work and check connection to ocsp using ping or mtr as shown below:

Have a Great Day!