my iMac pauses every night for up to 8 or 9 minutes. the whole system stops responding, but eventually catches up.
I opened Console to look for the events that might be causing the pause, but can't see anything earlier than a few minutes ago.
how do I view logs from 1 to 3 hours ago?
Mojave on an iMac with 16GB RAM and more than 100GB of spare room on the startup drive.
cheers
Gregory
iMac 27" 5K, macOS 10.14
The "Messages" part of the Console displays new messages not old ones since the Console app was launched. You need to select other logs in the left pane of the Console to get earlier logs. Apple keeps changing the labels in the Console, but you want to look near the bottom of the left pane for the system logs which may be in a folder "/private/var/logs" although some system logs can be accessed in other folders (Diagnostics ?).
These logs are virtually worthless to use for troubleshooting these days. Good luck finding anything useful in them. You may want to check the installer logs to see if the system is checking or installing updates at that time (I don't recall where those logs are kept, just check each folder in the left pane of the Console which may open of a second pane containing more logs).
You are better off running EtreCheck to check for possible software issues. Feel free to post the report here using the "Additional Text" icon which looks like a piece of paper so other contributors can assist you in analyzing the report.
found it. my Mac runs fsck_apfs on the startup drive every night. running fsck_apfs on the startup drive 'freezes' the UI until it's over. the activity was logged in fsck_apfs.log
cheers
thank you for the reply.
already checked the logs you mentioned, but even they are limited to since the Console was launched, so of no use to me.
I was following up on a web page that suggested the pauses could be due to iCloud sync problems, hence looking for etilqs messages in the log that would be logged at the time of the pause.
EtreCheck found nothing of note. my system was re-installed from scratch on a fully formatted fusion HDD only a couple of months ago.
I get "Startup disk is full" errors too even though the startup drive has 100+ GB of free space, and the occasional "insufficient RAM, choose an app to quit" error even though Activity Monitor shows that I have unused RAM when the message is displayed. but these are not related to this thread.
thank you again for the reply.
Gregory Rivers wrote:
already checked the logs you mentioned, but even they are limited to since the Console was launched, so of no use to me.
There should be multiple "system.log.X.gz" logs where "X" is a number, but sometimes macOS does wipe out all the older logs for some unknown reason.
You can try running the laptop in Safe Mode since it disables unnecessary drivers, Startup & Login items, plus it runs a file system check and removes some temp & cache files.
If you migrated or restored from a backup, then you may have brought the problem back again. You may need to erase the drive and reinstall macOS clean without migrating or restoring anything so you can determine if the issue is caused by hardware or software.
You may want to run DriveDX to check the health of the drives. Feel free to post the report for both the SSD & the hard drive using the "Additional Text" icon which looks like a piece of paper.
viewing earlier console logs
