Since installing Catalina yesterday, multiple crashes from userspace watchdog timeout

In summary - here are the only things that consistently work for me as a temporary fix, per suggestions from others:

Run a QuickTime movie looping continuously in the background.

OR

Run 'caffeinate -u -d' in a Terminal session and power off the external monitor (leaving the USB-C cable / adapter attached) when away from the system.

I have not tried the eGPU approach but that seems to work for others as well.

No fix but I have a workaround that works for my 16" MBP connected to an external display in clamshell mode:

1. Set your display to never sleep whilst on Power Adaptor, in Energy Saver settings (drag the bar all the way to the right) and this will also turn on "Prevent computer from sleeping...".
2. Ensure you have your favourite screen saver automatically come on after x minutes to protect your display (I also made a hot corner for when I leave the room)
3. Before I go to bed, I simply turn off my USB-C monitor, which effectively is like physically unplugging it from the laptop, and I leave it.
4. I come back to it in the morning or anytime later, and the first thing I do is switch on the monitor fully, then wiggle my mouse or tap my keyboard to wake the Mac.

The above works for my workflow, which is typical computer usage during the day.

So far the above has worked every time for me and its become my workaround. You can also simply leave the Mac connected to an external display but open as a second screen, which works fine.

The above is for a 16" MBP, hope it helps someone until there's a fix.

Hi Noah,

Besides running 'caffeinate -u -d' in an iconified Terminal window, I have my EnergySaver sysprefs set to prevent sleeping when the display is off. In Desktop sysprefs I have my screensaver configured to start after 30 minutes. I'm not sure if either of those sysprefs is critical (especially the latter), but you can experiment. Maybe make sure caffeinate is still running (via ps) before you walk away? I also power off my external monitor (but do not disconnect it). I can't think of anything else that I did to work around this problem.

This problem does seem to vary in its severity with regard to different systems. It looked like the original reports were all related to dual-monitor configs like yours, so those may be the worst-affected. My single-monitor setup worked just fine until the latest 10.15.5 update. This problem has been around for way too long now and seems to be worsening (at least by my own experience). Apple ought to be embarrassed by this mess, especially as the crash is so readily reproducible, but that would seem to not be the case.

I have a MBP 16. I can reliably reproduce this crash like clock work in seconds. I have

1. booted in safe mode
2. reset the the SMC
3. cleared the pram
4. reinstalled the os
5. reformatted the hard drive and resinstalled the os
6. gotten a logic board swap.

All I have to do is setup a hot corner to sleep my mac and then go to that hot corner (or I can just wait for it to sleep based on a time out)

My MBP16 is connected to a CalDigit TS3+ dock exactly like the one apple sells in it's store. It has the Apple Magic Wireless Keyboard with Numeric Keypad attached as well as a Microsoft blue tooth mouse. It's connected to ethernet and a Dell 3008WFP monitor via DisplayPort. In this configuration it crashes every time the computer goes to sleep.

So my timeline is this:

Got MBP 16' in March with graphics options:

AMD Radeon Pro 5500M 4 GB

Intel UHD Graphics 630 1536 MB

Up until 10.15.5 came out, I had zero problems/crashes and I always have the laptop closed and an external display connected with an official Apple A/V adapter using HDMI. As soon as I installed 10.15.5 the panics started happening.

Reason:           (1 monitored services unresponsive): checkin with service: WindowServer returned not alive with context: unresponsive work processor(s): WindowServer main thread  40 seconds since last successful checkin

Literally after the update ended, I didn't touch the laptop for some time, the external monitor went to sleep and the laptop panic'ed and rebooted. I installed apps like Caffeine to prevent the external monitor from going to sleep and managed to continue working.

Some days after this the crashes started happening even when the monitor was not going to sleep. Usually when using apps that put some strain on the video such as video conferencing apps. These crashes started to become more frequent. The display froze, for about 2 minutes, the laptop started getting very warm and the fans would not go faster, then after 2 minutes the fans go into turbo mode for about 1 second and the laptop reboots.

After this I reverted to 10.15.4 and reset SMC, etc, and the panics when the display goes to sleep are gone, but the crashes when I'm using the computer continue. I tried ditching the adapter and using a usb-c displayport cable but the problem remained.

As a final test, I unplugged everything from the laptop and disabled "automatic graphics switching" to force the AMD to be used even with no external display. Sure enough, I was able to reproduce the issue. So it seems not related to an external display, but the AMD card itself (which is always used when an external display is connected).

Sad times.

anonymouse: How are you connecting your external monitors?

One other wrinkle I neglected to mention that may have caused my crash: after switching my two 27" external monitors to directly connect with separate USB-C to Displayport cables, I also added a third external monitor, connected via HDMI but using a USB-C multi-adaptor (USB-A, Ethernet, HDMI, etc.). My suspicion (based on what others have mentioned in this long thread) is that using that adaptor is what triggers the crash. I've now disconnected the HDMI monitor connected via multi-adaptor (by unplugging the HDMI cable from the multi-adaptor but still leaving the multi-adaptor connected via USB-C to provide USB-A ports for mouse, scanner, etc. So we'll see if that helps. After doing that earlier this afternoon, I haven't have any crashes. If I make it through Monday, I will assume that that is the cause, that is, ANY external monitor connected via an adaptor can cause the crash.

I also have unchecked "Prevent computer from sleeping automatically when the display is off". That's actually what I meant to say in my note from 10:57am. So I am allowing the computer to sleep when the display is off.

Thinking that Sidecar was perhaps a very significant (video feature) addition to Catalina, I went into the Sidecar preference panel and unchecked the checked-by-default "Show Sidebar" and "Show Touch Bar" picks. I have no idea of the extent to which this may or may not "disable" Sidecar. Then I put the MBP15i9 2018 back into a 3 external monitor setup, which I run with the lid open, giving 4 effective monitors. I did this yesterday evening. No crashes yet. But need to get through a full week-day of strenuous use before saying that this made any improvement.

I have not posted here in probably a month (or so). I basically put my 2019 Macbook Pro "on the shelf" until I could find time to deal with it. I had reloaded my 2015 MBP with Mojave (fresh install), and have been able to work on THAT laptop as my daily driver, so the urgency on the 2019 machine was not as great. I finally thought I would just try to also do a fresh install of Mojave on the 2019 one as well (after doing a backup of everything before shipping it back to home office). Long story short -- I ended up in a huge mess where I could not install ANYTHING (even over internet recovery). Apparently, I (or this possessed machine itself) somehow hosed the hard drive and the internal recovery to a point of no return. So the home office IT folks recommended just taking it to Apple store to have them fix or replace it (since it was under warranty). BUT... Apple stores here in Nashville area are not yet open, so I ended up taking to Simply Mac. They were finally able to install Mojave, and told me to take it home and see how it acted/performed -- if the watchdog and/or kernel panic issues remained (After fresh install) they would re-diagnose under the same warranty ticket.

SO... I have had the laptop back (running fresh Mojave install) for about 8 days now, and all I can say is "NOTHING". No crashes, no panics, almost zero fan noise. NOTHING. I even spent a whole day doing video capture of some old home movies (which did stress the CPU quite a bit, and the fan did occasionally fire up), but it behaved like a champ. Based on this (at least in MY situation), neither Catalina updates/fixes or the latest beta (of BS) helped my issues. But a fresh install of Mojave DID -- at least for these past 8-9 days. I was almost to the point where I was certain there MUST be some hardware issue at play (CPU, memory, mainboard, etc.), but I may end up being proven wrong. I plan (next week) to re-install all of my development tools and try using the 2019 MBP as my daily machine again -- that will be the true test. If all goes well for a few weeks, then my 2019 MBP may simply be married to Mojave forever -- "happily ever after". Sad, but there are worse things, I suppose... :)

Just wanted to share my experience (for what it's worth). I know we are all frustrated, and all do not necessarily have the same exact root cause -- just a lot of similar symptoms, and NOT a lot of concrete answers and solutions.

Success and solutions to all...

KT

10.15.4 is out – give it a go! :)

You are really my life saver!!! Looks like I've had exactly the same issue you described. I've downgraded macos to 10.15.5 and all the crashes disappeared. 3 days straight and no issues.

This happens to me reliably when i have an external monitor connected though a docking station and system is idle. If i have a video or other non static content displaying on the external monitor, my MacBook Pro I9 does not crash. This is new for Catalina and same configuration did not crash on Mojave. Need a fix...

I can stop crash if i manually sleep the mac, even when external monitors are connected

In other words don't wait for Mac to sleep automatically,

Do a manual sleep, when your work is done

Looks like auto firing of sleep event is firing crash code

I think that the problem is any kind of usb-c multiport adapter with monitor connected. At home, where I connect my MacBook Pro with two monitors directly via two usb-c cables I never had crash problems. At the office, where I have two monitors connected by an Elgato Dock Pro, I have had continuous crashes until the Catalina update.

Apple, About this Mac, System Report, scroll down to applications under the Software section, and then I sorted by the "Obtained from" column and clicked on each app that wasn't an apple app. There's a kind field that designates if its 32-bit, 64-bit, or both. Some of the websites say there's a kind column you can look at in the system report but I only four columns "Application Name, Version, Obtained from, and Last Modified. So I just clicked on each app and looked at the details