mac pro late 2013 freezes with spinning wheel

i bought a mac pro (late 2013) 50 days ago, os is yosemite 10.10.3. I often get the spinning wheel of death and the mac freezes, i.e. it doesn't react to mouse click or keyboard. it happens on average 1 time a day. When it happens i have to restart the machine by pressing the computer's power button.

I have already contacted apple support by phone, i have made many reset operations under their control, but nothing changed.

After the restart, when i examine the console log the last message before the reboot is often the following one

windowserver: surface testing disallowed updates for 10 sequential attempts

By searching this message on google i found that the problem might be related with the energy saving settings, i.e. it happens when the mac wakes from sleep. So i changed those settings to prevent the mac going on stop state, and today the problem did not happen, but i'm not sure what wil happen tomorrow ... so i'm looking for information/advice about this kind of problem.

Mac Pro (Late 2013), OS X Yosemite (10.10.3)

Posted on May 16, 2015 12:19 PM

Top-ranking reply

burraga

Level 1

9 points

Posted on Sep 10, 2017 7:16 PM

As previously posted, I also have had this issue. My work around was to schedule an automatic shut down at 5pm and restart everyday at 6.30pm when I had the Mac Pro running all day and night. As long as it did this, the Mac Pro would not freeze.

In August, I finally had a chance to take the Mac Pro into Apple for repair. They kept it for a couple of weeks, whilst they carried out their tests. They were able to see the Mac Pro freeze after a day of staying on continuously (no restarts or logouts). Apple then ran my Mac Pro with their own clean MacOS for 3 days and it did not freeze.

Apple's solution was for macOS Sierra to be re-installed (clean install) and see if that fixes my issue. Which I have done.

2 weeks later I can report that my Mac Pro has not frozen again.

I did have one occasion when it started running really slow but once I quit iTunes it started to run normally again.

I'm now optimistic that the issue with my Mac Pro is now fixed.

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213 replies

Feb 18, 2017 4:53 PM in response to matuzalem

What's the news on your second machine and your problems.

I'm having the same problems on a second machine as well. The first was first finally replaced.

Jul 29, 2017 8:02 AM in response to evickers

which screensaver?

If Flurry, use something less graphics-card-tricks intensive.

evickers

Level 1

4 points

Jul 29, 2017 8:04 AM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

It is Flurry. My goal was to try to see if there's still a problem, which there is.

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mac pro late 2013 freezes with spinning wheel