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unexpected "freezes" in Catalina

the transition to Catalina has been surprising - some aspects that I expected to be troublesome were actually very smooth - and vice-versa!

since the upgrade, I have had a problem with "freezes" - as opposed to "crashes" - with a crash, the whole system has to be restarted and there's nothing you can do. But with a freeze, the system freezes for a while but it's only temporary - sometimes it takes as long as 20 minutes or more, but it eventually unfreezes.

I can't figure out what the conditions are for this to happen - except that it's only started happening after the Catalina upgrade. And that it seems to happen when I'm using VLC, but then I use VLC incredibly frequently, almost all the time, so I'm not sure if that's a factor.

Has anyone else experienced anything like this? I'd be grateful for any feedback. This is getting so annoying that I would almost consider downgrading back to Sierra!

straighten up & fly right, and thanks!

Mac mini, macOS 10.15

Posted on Oct 20, 2019 8:57 AM

Best reply

Old Toad

Level 10

207,733 points

Posted on Oct 20, 2019 10:33 AM

Log into another user account and see if the problem persists there in Photos. (This tells us if the problem is limited to your user account or is system wide). If the problem goes away then run

Etrecheck as described below.

Next, boot into Safe Mode and run for a while to see if the problem persists. (This tells us if there is any 3rd party software that is causing the problem as no 3rd party software is allowed to run.)

NOTE: Safe Mode boot can take up to 10 minutes as it's doing some system cache cleaning, volume verifying and directory repairing.

Download and run Etrecheck. Etrecheck is a diagnostic tool that was developed by one of the most respected users here in the ASC and recommended by Apple Support to provide a snapshot of the system and help identify the more obvious culprits that can adversely affect a Mac's performance.

Copy the report

and use the Add Text button to include the report in your reply. How to use the Add Text Feature When Posting Large Amounts of Text, i.e. an Etrecheck Report

Before running Etrecheck assign Full Disk Access to Etrecheck so that it can get additional information from the Console and log files for the report:

Then we can examine the report and see if we can determine what's causing the problem..

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unexpected "freezes" in Catalina

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