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Hang up in "Internet Accounts" in System Preferences.

Is anyone else having issues loading "Internet Accounts" in system preferences? It is extremely slow for me and occasionally totally freezes.

Posted on Oct 24, 2013 4:33 PM

Reply
31 replies

Feb 3, 2017 9:16 AM in response to Jerrytim

Jerrytim, that solved my problem!


Symptoms:

- Messages and MacMail (and others) starts frozen (the spinyball/beachball/pinwheel)

- Many many apps (Photoshop, Preview, Chrome) freeze when I use "Save As" (same spinyball/beachball/pinwheel)

- "Internet Accounts" in System Preferences is empty (I have 4 accounts in there normally, 1 iCloud and 3 Google).

- Finding stuff like this in the Applications/Utilities/Console app

1/27/17 10:33:51.218 AM CalNCService[46314]: [com.apple.calendar.store.log.accounts] [We timed out trying to get 69C9759E-E8F3-4656-9BA6-337741574F86's parent account.]

- Log out (or Reboot) will fix the problem (all symptoms are solved). Until a day or two later all symptoms reappear.


Other info:

- I close my lid every night and then reopen in the morning before work, keeping it open all day, attaching/reattaching to external monitor/kb/mouse all day long.


Fix:

- Open a terminal

- Look for the accountsd process:

ps -ef | grep accountsd

- Here it is:

502 322 1 0 Wed09PM ?? 95:27.29 /System/Library/Frameworks/Accounts.framework/Versions/A/Support/accountsd

- Kill the process using the process ID:

kill -9 322

- Verify it has a new ID now:

ps -ef | grep accountsd

- Now shows a new accountsd process (with a different process ID number), and all above symptoms are now GONE. Hooray


And.... here's a one liner to kill accountsd:

kill -9 $(ps aux | grep -e accountsd | awk '{ print $2 }')

It will auto restart next time you access an account (just run System Preferences / Internet Accounts)


So.... Apple. My dearest Apple, Something is going wrong with your accountsd process. It's rotting. Hanging. Or something. I hope your engineers can fix this so that I'm not super-inconvenienced every time it decides to rot again. But now I know how to fix the issue every time this happens, without having to log out, which is a HORRIBLE experience. So, I'll make myself a little script to kill it. Which turns this HUGE inconvenience into a minor annoyance. I dont even like to be minorly annoyed, so I do hope you fix it.. 🙂

Feb 8, 2017 9:00 AM in response to Macnogeek

More error messages, for helping in people's internet searches. (see my previous response with a bandaid fix).

My console app was FULL of these, with different GUIDs, i'm talking 100's.


2/8/17 10:18:36.372 AM CalNCService[325]: [com.apple.calendar.store.log.accounts] [We timed out trying to get 08CD879C-0254-41AE-8540-C143AA6713B8's parent account.]

2/8/17 10:18:54.915 AM CalendarAgent[315]: [com.apple.calendar.foundation.accounts] [We timed out attempting to get an account for 49C85EFD-5C35-4D26-82A9-56E77C95AFC4.]

2/8/17 10:39:34.049 AM CalendarAgent[315]: [com.apple.calendar.store.log.caldav.queue] [Failed to write event due to an HTTP 412 response (Precondition Failed). Will fetch the latest data for the event with local UID [394421D5-EBE0-4E4A-A230-B29639E3E719] and shared UID [2B6D4263-BD08-4E2F-A090-6B73ACDB6B88].]

2/8/17 10:39:28.279 AM CalendarAgent[315]: [com.apple.calendar.store.log.caldav.coredav] [Refusing to parse response to PROPPATCH because of content-type: [text/html; charset=UTF-8].]
2/8/17 10:16:35.426 AM CalendarAgent[315]: [com.apple.calendar.store.log.caldav.queue] [Adding [<CalDAVAccountRefreshQueueableOperation: 0x7fbdb68e2700; Sequence: 0>] to failed operations.]



My problem still exists of course. Every day or so, I have to run my one-liner command to kill accountsd.

Would love a permanent fix.

Oct 29, 2013 5:04 AM in response to Macnogeek

Another "me too" with Preferences hang. Running 100% CPU. Some weirdness going on in Mail. Also having sync failures in Calendar that seem to be related to internet accounts. It's reporting failures to connect to google and other serves. Works fine for a while after reboot but then things start hanging.

Oct 29, 2013 8:45 AM in response to GWS

I guess it's not an isolated problem. Since posting the original hang with system preferencesthe I've noticed the other issues with Mail and Calendar. Mail hangs and freezes on launch and calendar will not sync at times. Unfortunately, I don't get crash reports dialogs for them, so I can't send the report to Apple.

Oct 29, 2013 10:07 AM in response to Macnogeek

Calendar hasn't given me a problem, but Mail freezes on quit, and Maps won't load -- all on one machine, but they all work fine on another. They're both mid-2010 iMacs, but the one that works is the wide-screen one, the one that doesn't is the smaller-screen machine.


The accounts setup should be the same for both (but I can't tell because Internet Accounts won't load on the one machine).


As for the problem machine: Besides hangs in Mail, I also tried to launch Maps in Maverick after a short time earlier failing to get System Preferences to properly load Internet Accounts and having to force-quit it againt. I think the problem with Maps was Internet Accounts, but I can't (yet) prove it as I have an actual life.


Maps loaded to the point where the menu bar appeared and its location-in-use triangle showed up there as well, but the app did not go further: it did not dispay a window, let alone a map, nor did it instead draw the swirling busy icon despite repeated attempts to get it to either compete loading, to quit (no menus would respond to clicks) or to trigger the icon so it would report as unresponsive in Force Quit Applications (which not only reported it was running fine, but wouldn't force it to quit,either). Maps just sat there, half running and half not, and untouchable.


I had to power up Activity Monitor, find Maps in its list, and force-quit it from there.


This is really starting to bug me. Logging out to the System and back in again to my adminstrative domain on my machine does not solve the issue, either. Neither Internet Accounts nor Maps would work.

Oct 30, 2013 8:21 PM in response to Macnogeek

I'm having the same problems; first noticed in Calendar with most calendars failing to sync (even iCloud ones). I do have a google account in there, which I thought I deleted but came back. I'm trying to delete it again — gotta restart I suppose to get Internet Accounts to open.


HOWEVER — I repaired permissions, which found a ton of errors, and after that Internet Accounts and Calendar worked just fine — for a while. Then it went back to the same issue, and subsequent permissions repairs aren't doing any good.


I'll remove google calendar and see if that does the trick. In fact I can probably remove it entirely, since I check google mail in gmail. Will report back.


-Joseph

Oct 30, 2013 9:27 PM in response to jlinaschke

OK here's news… after a reboot I was able to open the Internet Accounts setting. I have three google accounts, all of which Mail was turned on for, however I check all those accounts in the browser so I turned 'em all off. I turned off calendars as I don't need that, and everything else too wtih the exception of contacts on one account which I *do* need synced.


So far, Calendar is syncing no problem (all accounts are iCloud), and Messages started behaving again too.


Time will tell if that fixes it, but it's a good start for anyone else with this issue.


-Joseph

Nov 16, 2013 3:32 AM in response to Macnogeek

The problem was caused by dodgy entries in the accounts.plist file in my User Library folder. It appears that either when I upgraded to Mavericks this file gained many thousands of duplicate entries, or maybe these entries were in there before but previously the OSX/Mail combination was more tolerant. When I removed these the problem with Mail disappeared. Here’s what I did….


1> Make the user Library folder visible - in Mavericks this is a lot easier than Lion/Mountain Lion. Simply open up your user directory in Finder, select menu View>Show View Options, and select “Show Library Folder”

2> Navigate through username>Library>Mail>V2>MailData and select the Accounts.plist file. If this file is multiple megabytes (mine was 40+mb) then this is likely the cause of your problem (once sorted mine ended up at 19k in size!)

3> To be safe, make a copy of this file (I placed the copy on my desktop).

4> Using your chosen text editor (I used Text Wrangler but I’m sure TextEdit would work just fine) open the Accounts.plist in the MailData folder (not your backup copy) and take a look. If it’s the same as me you will find hundreds and hundreds of entries for the same mailbox repeated in there. Mine was an old MSN mailbox that I never use any more (I’ve seen in other forums that other Hotmail type accounts also seem to be the culprits in this context). There will likely be two lots of repeated data, one in the XML “DeliveryAccounts” <array> section, and one lot in the “MailAccounts” <array> section.

5> Delete (keeping in mind the need to select the XML sections correctly from <dict> to </dict> completely) all those extra entries that you found, keeping the mail accounts you do need, in the XML and save the file.

6> Mail should open up nice and fast again and not eat your system

7> If this did not work, and causes problems because of over eager deleting in <5> you can replace your broken Accounts.plist file with your backup and try again.

Hang up in "Internet Accounts" in System Preferences.

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