Catalina Hard Crashes

Question

Level 1

11 points

Catalina Hard Crashes

Updated 3 Mac's including 2 Mac-Mini's and Imac27. All running Catalina 10.15.6 All configured with at least 16K of ram(Imac27 has 24K) All running with fusion drives or from ssd's.... 1 Mac-Mini and Imac27 are targets for backups. Since upgrading to Catalina(Waited till 10.15.5 as machines are production machines) backups (both with TM and CCC) have failed. CCC reporting 'Destination volume disappeared" messages. Thought it might be USB disks attached to both systems. Ran multiple tests... seems to be working. Then I personally experienced a hard crash in the middle of the day on the Imac27. I don't remember a hard crash since the advent of OS X years ago.... System totally gone.... Could not restart finder.... Could not force quit... no open windows working at all. Waited 5 minutes or so...nada... Needed to do a forced hardware shut down with the power switch... Have been watching Activity Monitor for several days.... Seems like there is a memory leak somewhere as used memory keeps creeping up. Memory returned when applications closed.... but memory usage continues to go up...

Looked at Console... MDS seems like a hot mess...

Seeing multiple... "xxx.com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.mdworker.shared.05000000-0100-0000-0000-000000000000[1631]): Service exited due to SIGKILL | sent by mds[1524]" messages (Which from other posts seems to be Spotlight)

Also seeing multiple "xxx.com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.xpc.launchd.domain.pid.diskutil.1602): Failed to bootstrap path: path = /usr/sbin/diskutil, error = 2: No such file or directory" messages

Also seeing multiple messages for XCODE... and TV which is odd as neither app have been user initiated.

Normally I would say.... reload macOS from recovery disk.... but all 3 machines are doing this.... So it is not a machine specific anomaly.... What am I missing other than there is a system bug in Catalina somewhere?

iMac 27″, macOS 10.15

Posted on Jul 22, 2020 9:12 AM

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Answer 1

Old Toad

Level 10

208,105 points

Jul 24, 2020 9:35 AM in response to Julien Antkies

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

IMPORTANT:

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

Also click and read the About info to further permit full disk access.

Then we can examine the report and see if we can determine what might be causing the problem.

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Answer 2

dim243

Level 1

4 points

Jul 23, 2020 3:08 AM in response to KVTinnkeeper

Hi all! I've been experiencing exactly the same issue on the 27'' iMac for a couple of days now since I updated to Catalina 10.15.6. The computer freezes, after a while screen goes black but drives keep working. I leave it for hours but after hard reset, it comes back properly.

Etrecheck found that some Other processes 187.97 % (?) CPU. On the activity monitor, I also see on the top of the list mds, mds_stores and mdsync only. I post my etrecheck report below.

Also when I re-logon after a hard reset Adobe Creative Cloud asks for permission to do changes so this could be related.

EtreCheck version: 5.5.5 (5111)

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Answer 3

KVTinnkeeper Author

Level 1

11 points

Jul 24, 2020 2:39 PM in response to Old Toad

Old Toad : I presume you were telling people who replied to my post to download Entrecheck as if you had read my post reporting on the progress I was making to fix the issues I was having you will see that I had loaded it and was using it...

In that spirit.... I will copy the report for my machine below... Before I do, there are 2 things to note...

It is still reporting 1 32 bit app, without identifying it. Not really helpful since other tools are reporting clean. (Actually it is kinda spammy because it is asking you to pay to have the application revealed.....)

It is reporting crash information.

EtreCheck Report generated: 2020-07-24 17:25:51

All of the crashes being reported, except 1, were from 7/22.... which was before I went on the aggressive hunt for 32 bit apps to purge. The only crash that is occurring with regularity now (IE 7/24) is mds....

The report is attached as additional text to this post... tell me what you see.... Thanks....

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Answer 4

KVTinnkeeper Author

Level 1

11 points

Jul 24, 2020 12:56 AM in response to dim243

On the crashing issue I reported... Have not had a crash Today. Found several items....

When I did the upgrade to Catalina 10.15.5 I did not purge the iMac of 32 bit applications. I have been retiring them over the last year, replacing them with 64 bit apps. In the process of retiring them, I moved them into a subfolder in applications for safekeeping.

Not a bad strategy.... but... I did not uninstall them..They still were calling LaunchAgents and LaunchDaemons at start up. They also had various frameworks running around the machine.. After meticulously removing all the old apps, and tracking down the crud they left behind in various libraries, the system stability improved dramatically. Personally, my bad... I did think that Catalina would be better at ignoring the older stuff... but I guess that some of the plists in the agents and daemons were getting read with wonky processes getting set off. (not a highly technical explanation... but its the best I've got.) Bottom line... make sure your system is clean of 32 bit apps. I have used Go64, entreCheck, and 32-bitCheck to hunt things down... then a combination of installer logs and internet searches for manual processes to find/delete the files. (Since the app's are 32bit... the uninstallers supplied with the original apps are worthless with Catalina.) It was a very tedious process, but the results are significant.

With the 32bit apps cleaned up, system stability dramatically improved, but I am still seeing some other issues. Specifically:

Watching Activity Monitor there does seem to be a memory leak or memory creep taking place when copying large numbers of files across a network. I see the "Memory Used" count slowly increase until almost all available memory is consumed(20GB or so out of 24GB in the Imac27). I thinks this is happening for 1 of 2 reasons... It could be that a process is leaking memory... or it could be because of the mismatch between Network Speed (Thunderbolt Bridge) and Disk Write Speed (Sata3 3.5). Possibly the network is not being throttled as memory buffers build up resulting in a buffer overflow and crash of the system. I have worked around this problem by being more selective on my back up, copying only user data across the network for back up instead of the whole disk, or the user data and applications. I keep a full clone on locally attached disks, but my back up strategy had been to cross full backups to separate machines to provide greater reliability in case of hardware failures. This currently seems problematic. Unless it is a network configuration issue(see next item) this is probably a bug.
I am also seeing what appear to be routing issues between the Mac mini and the iMac27. As I previously mentioned, they are connected together via a thunderbolt bridge to facilitate high speed networking between the 2 machines. They are also connected via ethernet connections to our hardwired network to ultimately go outside the building. In early versions of MacOs, the internal network stack seemed to always pick the thunderbolt bridge when ever inter machine IP traffic was generated. With Catalina that does not seem to be the case. It seems to take the ethernet route as its first choice (Even though in the network configuration Thunderbolt is identified as the first service.) When I set the ethernet service inactive, networking does switch over to the thunderbolt bridge, and throughput dramatically increases. But something is not right. I have not dumped the network configuration, so it is possible that there is a conversion problem between High Sierra and Catalina for network configuration... More investigation required on this.
I have not gone back to using TimeMachine yet. I have gotten CCC working reliably(after sorting out various permission issues). I will go back and look at it, but without the thunderbolt bridge working reliably between machines, I don't think there is any real hope of getting TimeMachine working reliably for network backup as the time to backup would be large.
MDS is still crashing repeatedly, but with the 32bit application purge, the system has enough stability to deal with it. I have told Spotlight to ignore locally attached usb disks...but that does not seem to diminish the MDS crashes. When I reboot the system with the locally attached usb disks physically removed, the number of MDS crashes diminishes... but they are still happening.... More investigation required on this...

Bottom line so far...

Purge 32 bit apps (Again... my bad)
If your doing network backups, back up only what you really need (your data)
Keep a locally attached disk for full machine backups/clones...

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Answer 5

Jul 24, 2020 8:40 AM in response to KVTinnkeeper

I have a iMac (Retina 4K, 21.5-inch, 2019) with 32 GB of Ram running macOS Catalina 10.15.6. I have experienced two finder freezes where the only recourse was to restart the machine. This could be an OS bug.

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Answer 6

Jul 24, 2020 3:52 PM in response to KVTinnkeeper

I've seen reports elsewhere here that it's impacting Mojave machines with the latest patch, as well as the Big Sur Beta.

I experienced the same hard crash symptoms and had to scratch my head as to the last time I'd seen an OS X system hang so completely. Even the trackpad went inert. Not just the pointer, push feedback entirely. Also the odd TV app references in the log.

I tried various approaches to resetting Spotlight, including the GUI-friendly method — adding and removing "Macintosh HD" from the privacy tab — and rebuilding the database from the command line. In the course of doing so, I managed to break Spotlight completely, or so I thought. FASCINATINGLY, when I attached my bootable clone, Spotlight COULD search its contents without any hiccups. That sent me down the rabbit hole of file permissions, wondering if maybe somehow Spotlight or the md* tools behind it had lost access to my home directory, for example. No joy there, although it's something I still wonder about.

Finally, I did a clean install of Catalina followed by a Migration Assistant restore from that same external volume.

The good news? Spotlight is back. Bad news? So is the ever-growing spaghetti tangle of those SIGKILLs

Jul 24 17:41:27 MacBook-Pro com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.mdworker.shared.03000000-0400-0000-0000-000000000000[15114]): Service exited due to SIGKILL | sent by mds[121]

In fact, wow ... these command lines are all just a few seconds apart :::

@MacBook-Pro ~ % grep SIGKILL /var/log/system.log | wc -l

11136

@MacBook-Pro ~ % grep SIGKILL /var/log/system.log | wc -l

11148

@MacBook-Pro ~ % grep SIGKILL /var/log/system.log | wc -l

11164

@MacBook-Pro ~ % grep SIGKILL /var/log/system.log | wc -l

11236

Unfortunately, although I could probably stop it by disabling Spotlight again, I worry about having to go through the marathon experience of a fresh install and restore a second time. So, to keep Spotlight (on which I do rely a LOT), I guess I'll just live on the edge here and we'll see if it's the annoying-but-not-catastrophic problem some people claim or the origin of the throwback hardware hangs.

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Answer 7

KVTinnkeeper Author

Level 1

11 points

Jul 24, 2020 6:24 PM in response to Old Toad

yes... have run Go64. Coming back all clean. Have run 32-bitCheck which seems to take a deeper dive. It is reporting some items but upon further investigation it is reporting the 32bit branch of an app coded to run 32/64. (Many happen to be native apple apps). Have not seen anything that’s pure 32 but will keep looking over the next few days.

overall system stability greatly improved cleaning out the 32bit apps. I knew that they were not going to run, so I have replaced them all over the last year( though I did not delete them). I was surprised that some of them, mostly launch items I suspect, were firing up and raising havoc. Nowhere in the docs did I see install Cat on a virgin drive, which in hindsight if I did I would have saved myself some trouble.

still working on the other items. Have to get some real work done in the meantime so it will probably next week before I dive back in. Big open question for me is are the MDS crashes a bug, or is it still a machine issue at my end. Time will tell.

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