Power Nap not working correctly

I'm using a TIme Capsule and it works fine with Power Nap on my rMBP, so I don't have a problem, but I agree PN needs to be compatible with TM backups done to a plugged in external to be useful.

Mail. When it's working with Power Nap, the messages are collected and the spam filtered. It only runs once an hour, but it does help keep the junk to a minimum when I connect with my iPhone.

Unfortunately it fails as often as it works. It can fail in two ways. Most of the time it won't collect messages or do any filtering. Other times it collects message, and filters the spam, but although the spam is flagged as such, the messages remain in the inbox.

I'd leave it on and let it work since 50% is better than 0%, but Power Nap seems to have some other side effects. The rMBP seems much slower when waking up, and a few it didn't want to wake up at all and I had to do a reboot. Every now and then the rMBP would wake, but Mail, Calendar, and Contacts would be unresponsive and had to be force-quit. The problems went away with Power Nap tunred off.

Agreed.

All in all I'm happy with Mountain Lion. The installation went well and Power Nap is about the only problem I've run into.

Power Nap would be great if it worked, but it's not a biggie if it doesn't.

Is your external drive powered by the MBP or does it have it's own power supply? Mine is powered from the MBP when directly connected. I'm guessing there may be a problem arising from external drives being put to sleep before that are properly ejected during Power Nap. I'll try turning off the "put hard disk to sleep option" in System Preferences > Energy Saver(?) and see if that makes any difference when connected via the USB hub.

Or has someone tried this already?

I've just updated - I'll let you know how it goes.

Nope, same deal. If my backup drive is connected and powered directly by the MBPs USB port it survives a sleep and wake sequence. If it's connected and powered through a USB hub I get the "disk not ejected properly" error when waking from sleep.

And as before the USB thumb drive survives the sleep/wake cycle even though it is connected to the USB hub.

An optical drive also get's dumped from the hub.

I've also tried turning off power nap completely, then putting the MBP to sleep, and I get the same results.

Has anyone else seen this on non-retina MBPs, or on other macs running Mountain Lion?

I installed 10.8.1 on my rMBP when it was released two days ago. I didn't hold much hope for it to improve Power Nap since it wasn't mentioned in the update notes...

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5418

Although it wasn't mentioned in the release notes some people were reporting improvements with battery life of their portables...well, a return to pre-Mt. Lion battery life anyhow. So you never know what might be affected in an update.

Anyway, I did the update, and since it was potentially battery related, I also did a SMC reset...

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3964

The results? Well, Power Nap is worse if anything. Not only is Mail not being processed (which was working about 50% of the time), but now Time Machine isn't backing up (which was working 100% of the time).

I opened up the utility Console and checked the log files. I'm no expert, but it was clear Time Machine hadn't run. It only had this entry. Once it failed it didn't appear to try again...

8/24/12 10:50:03.036 PM airportd[2845]: _doAutoJoin: Already associated to “xxxxxxx”. Bailing on auto-join.

The only mention of Mail was in these three entries...

8/25/12 12:39:09.494 AM SyncServer[3109]: [0x7fcec0c0be80] |DataManager|Warning| Client com.apple.Mail sync alert tool path /System/Library/Frameworks/Message.framework/Resources/MailSync does not exist.

8/25/12 1:32:26.351 AM SyncServer[3223]: [0x7fd6a840be80] |DataManager|Warning| Client com.apple.Mail sync alert tool path /System/Library/Frameworks/Message.framework/Resources/MailSync does not exist.

8/25/12 5:42:01.606 AM SyncServer[3789]: [0x7f885b40be80] |DataManager|Warning| Client com.apple.Mail sync alert tool path /System/Library/Frameworks/Message.framework/Resources/MailSync does not exist.

I did a search on "MailSync does not exist" and didn't come up with much. It was in some log reports people posted when trying to get their OS X problems fixed. One indicated the MailSync error might be from some old device syncing...

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3294602?start=0&tstart=0

It's quite possible that could be the case on my machine since I've used Migration Assistant many times while upgrading hardware over the years.

Maybe 10.8.2? 😉

I just tried the same drive/hub combo on my iMac running 10.8 and didn't get any "not properly ejected" errors when sleep/waking - but power nap is not available on this Mac. Do we know if the problem is specific to MBPr or have people had the "not properly ejected" issue on other Macs?

BTW toggling various options in Energy Saver didn't make any difference on the MBPr.

I still could not get the "power nap" working on my base rMBP. So frustrated.😟 I tried every way suggested in here and by apple. None seemed to work. I reset the SMC a couple of thousand times, no luck. I even did a clean reinstall of the mountain lion yesterday, still I could not get the power nap working with the Mail (i left the mail app open while putting rMBP to sleep). I don't own a Time Machine so I don't know whether the power nap works with the automatic backup.

There is something weird I noticed. I re-dowanloaded the power app update from apple site today, trying to install the update for the second time. Then i saw an alert of saying "This feature is not supported on your system." (or something similar to that). I'm pretty sure my hardware meets the requirement of powernap( rMBP + Mountain Lion (10.8.1) ).

Hope Apple can investigate into this and provide a solution soon.

The error message you got when trying to reinstall the Power Nap update software is normal. It's a firmware update, so once it's run it stays there even if you reinstall the OS. However, it would be much better if the error message just said it was already installed.

After watching 10.8.1 on my rMBP for a couple of days, I've found Power Nap is now not working at all. Before 10.8.1 Time Machine was backing up to my Time Capsule and Mail was processing about half the time. Now neither work.

Other than being non-functional, Power Nap is actually better behaved now. Before Mail would seem to get confused and leave flagged spam messages in the InBox. A few times, on waking, Mail would get a spinning beach ball and hang. When that happened and I had Calander and Contacts open, they'd hang too. It seemed very Power Nap related.

Worse Power Nap seemed to slow down the rMBP's wake-up speed....and even seemed to be the cause of some failed wakeups (the machine was unresponsive and wouldn't wake up).

Now that the bad side effects seem to be under control, if Apple could actually make it work it would be handy indeed. 😉