iMac keeps crashing after Catalina upgrade

I am having the same issue (crashes while the Mac is not in active use) on a 2019 Macbook Pro.

Every time the Mac was left to idle, it would shut down. Like you, my crash log always started with: panic(cpu 2 caller 0xffffff7f8a39cad5): userspace watchdog timeout: no successful checkins from com.apple.WindowServer in 140 seconds

The cpu identified in the notice varied.

As the crashes only happened when the Mac was idle, I concluded the crashes were linked to sleeping. I've disabled all the sleep related settings in the energy saver options, disabled the screen savers, and also have enabled the Parallels Tools widget that prevents the Mac from sleeping. After doing those things, the Mac has not crashed (versus about 20 crashes in one day before). But, my monitors now are on all the time (at night I turn off the external monitors and turn the brightness all the way down).

Apple support said others were reporting the issue-but provided no solution.

same problem here, using a 2019 macbook pro with Pro vega card using dual monitors, never had a problem prior to the update after the update system crashes when left unattended for a while panic(cpu 2 caller 0xffffff7f9599cad5)

I have MacBook air and it has become extremely slow after Catalina update. As per Apple its compatible with MacBook air but it snot very efficient. I feel Like I am using a windows with 512MB ram. The boot up takes too long and once reached on user accounts the login to reaching desktop is painfully slow, switching between user accounts will make you feel slicing your wrist. Its a horrible experience which as ruined the entire excitement of new OS.

I hope Apple goes through these comments and does something about it.

It appears there is one process called "photoanalysisd" process that caused CPU went to roof. In my case, it was near 200% and it appears Catalina has a problem of managing such process. That is one of Apple programs. The Apple support asked me to create a separate new user account and log back in with that new user account to see if iMac would still crash. I did and Catalina holds and iMac didn't crash randomly anymore.

I'm going to try to empty my Picture folder and log back in with my original ID and see if that helps.

Anyway, Catalina sucks! It appears that there was a big gap in the testing as I didn't experience this kind before. I highly suggest you to enter your feedback at apple.com/feedback. I was told that Apple take the customer entered feedback "seriously". More people report that might get the fix prioritized and fixed early.

The lesson learned from this is that I will never jump on any of new MacOS again until it's true stable going forward.

After emptying photos in Pictures directory, I logged back in and don't see that crazy "photoanalysisd" process running crazy now. It has not crashed after 5 mins. Before, Catalina couldn't even last 5 mins. I will leave it run in this way and will see.

Ditto that... 2018 MacBook Pro Core i9, 32GB of RAM, Radeon Pro Vega 20, 1TB SSD, and after two more crashes, I could finally post this found in Crash Reports:

"Crashed Thread: 0 Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

Exception Type: EXC_CRASH (SIGKILL)

Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000000, 0x0000000000000000

Exception Note: EXC_CORPSE_NOTIFY

Termination Reason: WATCHDOG, [0x1] monitoring timed out for service

Termination Details: WATCHDOG, checkin with service: com.apple.WindowServer returned not alive with context:

unresponsive work processor(s): WindowServer main thread

40 seconds since last successful checkin, 5263 total successsful checkins since wake (0 induced crashes)

Application Specific Information:

StartTime:2019-10-11 00:14:23

GPU:IG&AMD

MetalDevice for accelerator(0x3227): 0x7f90ad50a568 (MTLDevice: 0x7f90b00a8000)

MetalDevice for accelerator(0x4703): 0x7f90ad420bc8 (MTLDevice: 0x7f90b0010000)

IOService:/AppleACPIPlatformExpert/PCI0@0/AppleACPIPCI/PEG0@1/IOPP/EGP0@0/IOPP/EGP1@0/IOPP/GFX0@0/ATY,Xingu@1/AMDFramebufferVega10"

The crash is the process name WindowServer pointing a t the video card. Mac crashes when I am away from it 10-20 minutes or so. If I use the Mac constantly, then there is no problem.

Déjà vu! I had a 2010 MacBook Pro once that got totaled because of dual video card issues, especially bad GPU cooling hardware. When is this going to be fixed for good, I have no clue.

it seems it doesn't crash anymore after I empty the Pictures folder. Now, I'm going to restore photos library one by one carefully in order to not let that photoanalysisd go crazy.

Whoever has a similar problem, you might wanna empty Pictures folder first after backing up your photos to Time Machine.

Yesterday I set 'Turn display off after' to 3 hrs and have not experienced this crash. I have one hot corner where I move the cursor to put display off. No other changes applied.

Keeping my fingers crossed again 😀

I have an Update with a New Condition as a result of Catalina.

First, an Apple Rep reached out to me last night to run and collect some diagnosis data. It looks like Apple is trying to figure this out, hopefully really soon.

For previous Apple reps, I was able to re-create the situation of the computer crashing after walking away, for this rep that called, the conditions changed.

First, as soon as I opened my computer, it crashed as it typically would since the update but this time my hard drive with the Time Machine was not pulling up. I was experiencing some flickering and change of monitors backdrops.

After working with the rep, my computer would successfully wake up. After several minutes (15-20). Another note, the rep was no longer able to do a screen share with me, unlike the previous reps before. I even downloaded a screen share app with no luck of communication.

I was convinced that something new started.

After I got off the phone with the rep, I looked at the disk utility and I found the Time Machine hard drive was not mounted, so I clicked "mount" and I would receive an error code:

Could not mount “Time Machine”. (com.apple.DiskManagement.disenter error 0.)

I Googled that code and the answers that I found was practically my hard drive is now completely gone. Catalina killed my backup of files since 2008 and I only had this hard drive for a year now.

Ok Apple, I'm starting to lose money because of this update (Very Important file history and over $100 price tag for a 6tb hard drive - rough estimate if I cannot recover the files, thousands of dollars in loss - mainly because of my profession). I'm getting serious now.

I have even attempted to re-start in recovery mode and I was going to run a complete restore to the Mojave OS, the same error would come up.

Thankfully I have an old time machine back up that I'm running now, no backups for a year but it's better than nothing. I did step away again with this and BAM! The issue returned!

It seems on my end, along with the monitors, Time Machine is contributing to the communication error with Catalina.

I'm staying with my computer this time, probably all day again on a Saturday, to make sure my backup completes without interruption or any loss.

One more note:

When my computer crashed this time with the old back up time machine running, I received this different error on the crash report:

BAD MAGIC! (flag set in iBoot panic header), no macOS panic log available

Thanks mrbofus for pointing this out. This does not give me any comfort.

I wish there was a facepalm moment. I'm in panic mode now and running major backups on both a new hard drive and now I'm uploading my backup to the cloud, all while baby sitting. Is there something better than caffeine and more legal than speed?

I need to figure out how to move back to Mojave now that my backup is gone.

Some good news here.

i had been getting the “could not mount”, “disenter” error on my backup, too, and thought it was lost. Would not mount, couldn’t run disk first aid. I had hoped to use the backup to restore to Mojave.

What I did that ultimately worked was boot into recovery with the original OS that my computer came with (opt-shift-CMD-R) and install High Sierra on an external drive. Then I booted from that, and updated that to Mojave.

While booted with that drive, i used Terminal to list the drives. My backup volume was listed, but it was decrypting, and was 22% completed. I never saw any progress on that.

I looked online and found that others had that happen when the disk was stuck on a fsck process. I checked for fsck processes, and it turned out there was one running on my backup drive that never seemed to complete. (That’s because with my machine crashing constantly, it could never finish, and it refused to mount until fsck was done.)

I think I’d started to decrypt the drive at some point when I was trying to use it as a restore source. Having the drive in mid-decrypt might explain why I wasn’t able to get it to show in Recovery.

I forced the fsck to quit, a few times (it kept resuming) but finally it stopped, and I got a finder message asking me if I wanted to use my Backup as a time machine drive.

i opened Disk Utility and ran that overnight, and checked this morning. Green check mark, drive is mounted, and terminal now shows 28% decrypted.

I’m going to let that complete, then boot into Recovery again (with my Mojave install as my boot disk I use get Mojave recovery instead of Catalina) and then try to restore to my Oct 7 backup.

I’ve already made a USB drive that contains any documents I’ve modified since then, which I can put back once the process is complete.

If you have the same issue as OP (the machine crashes reliably when you leave it alone for about 10 minutes, you probably have multiple external screens), I've made some progress. If your problem isn't like that (most of the comments here don't seem to be) YMMV, but I wouldn't expect this to help you.

The short version is, that I've made the crashes stop by deleting my Google accounts (and a weird looking null 'Contacts' account that was in the same list) from System Preferences | Internet Accounts. I'm currently re-adding my email addresses one by one to see if the crashing starts again. But there are thousands of mails to download, so it'll take a while before I can say whether that's safe.

I came to this conclusion by installing a fresh version of Catalina next to my main install. I couldn't reproduce the issue in the fresh install; no crashing. Then I gradually added apps and services one by one, leaving the machine alone for a while after each thing. If I came back and the session was still alive, I knew that app or service hadn't caused the problem. The crashing only started when I enabled my email accounts on that Preferences screen. Deleting them stopped the crashing (disabling them wasn't enough).

I hope this helps somebody out.

I should note, my issue was easier to test with 'Prevent computer from sleeping automatically when the display is off' enabled in Energy Saver, and the display sleep set to 1 minute. This is something that happens when the machine isn't actually asleep. A session left untouched with that setting enabled lasted less than 10 minutes before Kernel Panic usually.