Mac Pro 2009 crashes, lagging, kernel panics.

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Level 1

4 points

Mac Pro 2009 crashes, lagging, kernel panics.

For the past few months, my early 2009 Mac Pro has been causing me endless stress with kernel panics, odd behaviour, frustratingly slow load times, the list goes on. There is a lot, so I will do my best to be as brief as possible:

Mac Pro Early 2009

2 x 3.33 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon

96 GB 1333 MHz DDR3

AMD Radeon HD 7950 3 GB

Currently 1x new SSD boot and 1x 2TB HD

Usage:

Mostly Photoshop and Capture One

15 Email accounts on Mac Mail

InDesign

Spotify

And the usual suspects, Calendar, Notes, Activity Monitor for the last two months

Description of problems:

Startup is now slower. It glitches with lines at the top but I think that has always been there, maybe because of Mojave installation

2. Once the Mac does start the Wacom tablet wont work for at least 4 minutes, the mouse does work fine from the start

3. I will be using the Mac as usual, normal speeds, for a few hours sometimes and then something happens where everything is taking ages to do anything at all, saving in PS for example, clicking on anything at all will bring up the spinning wheel. I then either have to restart holding the power button or if I wait, after 10 or so minutes, sometimes less, everything will go back to normal

4. The start of the above happening is usually noticable when the Wacom pen has lag, a lot of it

5. Kernel panics...argh. Right, so I will be doing something like retouching on PS, editing in C1 or the last instance was watching YouTube and the Mac freezes completely then switches off, then switches back on. It used to come up with the 'something went wrong with your mac' message, but recently it hasn't. There is no single thing that I can see causing this, it could be anything.

Things I have tried:

New SSD boot drive, clones the old one as it got down to 25% on SSD Reporter
Taken out two drives, one SSD and one old 2TB HD
Checked the diagnostics reports for crash reports - with my limited knowledge I think it may be 'suggestd', linked with the Wacom Tablet - after some research some people have had this but I couldn't find a solution
Tried force quitting suggestd on Activity Monitor when it slows up, not sure it is doing much
Reinstalled Mac OS
Reset PRAM and SMC
Installed an older driver for Wacom, problem persisted so updated back to latest version
Booted into safe mode after a very long wait loading, Wacom didn't work at all, Wacom Desktop Centre immediately stuck on spinning wheel

Any help will be greatly appreciated. It is making my life **** and I need this Mac for work.

Here is a recent crash report: https://gist.github.com/AndrewH77777/0be2c9a243cfdb2fefa2eb610ed99444

Mac Pro, macOS 10.14

Posted on Jan 5, 2023 11:04 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Grant Bennet-Alder

Level 10

144,783 points

Jan 12, 2023 3:32 PM in response to AndrewH7777

• Let me say forcefully, you do NOT have a RAM memory problem, because your Mac Pro with Xeon processor uses Error Correcting Code RAM memory, and all seems to be present and working correctly.

• you may be using an older version of InDesign, as it had a memory allocation problem:

2023-01-12 20:22:54 Adobe InDesign 2020.app Hang (2 times)

Executable: /Applications/Adobe InDesign 2020/Adobe InDesign 2020.app

Details:

abort() called

CEPHtmlEngine(806,0x700016bc0000) malloc: Incorrect checksum for freed

object 0x7f967143fa98: probably modified after being freed.

Corrupt value: 0x200007f900000000

• you may be using the wrong version of Wacom tablet driver, as it crashed 25 times

2023-01-12 01:47:32 WacomTabletDriver.app Crash (25 times)

Executable: /Applications/Wacom Tablet.localized/.Tablet/WacomTabletDriver.app

Details:

*** Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSInvalidArgumentExcept

ion', reason: '-[__NSCFType copyWithZone:]: unrecognized selector sent

to instance 0x7fa7744108c0'

abort() called

terminating with uncaught exception of type NSException

• your use of BackBlaze appears to be misguided, AND you are being severely punished for it.

"On the cloud" is great for sharing photos, but is not a viable backup solution for everything you have. The stuff is not under your control, and is subject to sloppy handling, arbitrary changes in policy, theft, data loss [are they making frequent backups using best practices?], and bankruptcy of the company that holds it. It can easily take three days to restore it at ordinary Internet speeds.

If you do not have a recent local, disk-based backup, your computer is like a ticking Time bomb. You are only one disk failure away from losing EVERYTHING! Drives do not last forever. It is not a question of IF it will fail, only WHEN it will fail.

Based on the report, BackBlaze is consuming huge amounts of CPU, Memory, network bandwidth, and energy.

• Your third-party SSD drives, including your boot SSD, are not using TRIM, and they should be. otherwise the Write speed will decline with use, and performance will suffer.

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Answer 2

UTBadger

Community Specialist

Jan 8, 2023 12:43 PM in response to AndrewH7777

Hey AndrewH7777,

We'd be happy to help. Looks like you're experiencing unexpected restarts on your Mac Pro and have done quite a bit to try and resolve this matter.

Given the steps you've tried to this point, the only other thing that might be of help would be a clean install and then manually transferring only what's absolutely necessary afterward. You mentioned a reinstall, but if it wasn't a clean install, this would only impact system files. You also mentioned cloning a drive, but this may have just brought the issue over to the new drive.

For more help with this type of behavior, we'd also suggest reviewing the following resource: If your Mac restarts and a message appears

If all else fails, Apple Support would be best equipped to assist from here. They can be reached using this link: Get Support

We hope this helps out.

Take care!

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Answer 3

Jan 12, 2023 2:45 PM in response to AndrewH7777

your posted panic report does not offer any suggestions to my eye about what the problem may be.

I suggest you download and run this little discovery utility, Etrecheck, and post its report back to the forums:

Using EtreCheck to Troubleshoot Potential… - Apple Community

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Answer 4

Jan 12, 2023 3:42 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

in Terminal, use the command:

sudo trimforce enable

then enter your admin password (which will not be echoed) and press return.

it will post a huge disclaimer and ask if you wish to proceed, which you say yes to, and your Mac will restart.

Now trim is enabled for all FUTURE deletions.

https://www.lifewire.com/enable-trim-for-ssd-in-os-x-yosemite-2260789

To recover the substantial space still not TRIM-ed, restart your Mac in Safe Mode, where TRIM is respected, and run disk Utility Repair Disk against your SSD drives. Late in the process, it runs the FreeList to the drive as TRIM commands so the drive can release all those blocks it was holding. (In the detailed log, the message 'TRIM-ing unused blocks appears'. It is very satisfying.)

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Answer 5

AndrewH7777 Author

Level 1

4 points

Jan 12, 2023 2:07 PM in response to UTBadger

Apologies for my slow reply to this, had a very hectic past week.

Last night I did just that, a clean install of Mojave. Today it has been better, no complete crashes, just a lot of odd behaviour, sometimes it started super quickly, others it took nearly 10 minutes before it was usable. I am getting the spinning wheel randomly and then it appears to fix itself. Wacom is laggy at times, but again it fixes itself.

A lot of these problem seem to stem from Finder, sometimes even clicking on a different drive, trying to move files, saving from PS etc. Not sure that is of any use though.

I am assuming this must be a hardware fault of some sort. One thing I had never noticed that there are two red lights by the CPU, but I think this is because two RAM slots are empty and (I think) that is okay, right?

A few other things I ruled out/realised with a clean install:

It's not BackBlaze

It's not Vallum

It could be emails, a few times today I noticed new emails coming in and problems starting to happen

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Answer 6

Jan 8, 2023 2:19 PM in response to AndrewH7777

how much RAM is reported?

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Answer 7

AndrewH7777 Author

Level 1

4 points

Jan 12, 2023 3:51 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

Firstly, thank you so much for taking the time to look through the report and for your helpful and detailed reply.

I will look into the correct version of InDesign and Photoshop.

I have tried an older version of the Wacom driver, but will certainly try again. Interestingly, ten minutes ago I was retouching using Photoshop with a particularly heavy use of the tablet (continually drawing for a few minutes) and the Mac had a kernel panic and restarted - it is listed as 'suggestd' being the problem again.

Re Backblaze, it is a backup of a backup of a backup. I am a photographer and Editor-in-Chief of a magazine, I have a huge amount of images to backup daily so I am super careful in that respect. Having said that, I had no idea of the usage so I will definitely consider other options. It might be worth mentioning BB was backing up whilst Etre was running, it does so until every new file is backed up so every so often in a day.

Thank you so much for the info re TRIM, this is all new information for me so I will look into it more and run the Terminal command.

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