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mauro16 Author

Level 1

15 points

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

213 replies

Nov 23, 2015 9:14 AM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

I am from Austria, we have neither Apple Stores nor Genius Bars here.

I think telling public media is a reasonable way to wake Apple at this issue.

Nov 23, 2015 9:27 AM in response to peteracpacpacp

Then your Apple-Authorized Service Provider should be able to swap boards under your AppleCare coverage until the problem is solved.

If you did not choose to purchase Applecare within the first year of ownership, you have made a conscious decision to absorb the cost of repairs yourself.

Nov 23, 2015 10:21 AM in response to mauro16

To provide additional info about the problem I encountered with screen jerkiness with 10.11.1 update, I'm guessing it's a software problem because I reverted back to 10.10.5 and having no problems. I also had no problems after updating to 10.11.0. It's only after updating to 10.11.1 that I started having problems. I'm now hoping that when the 10.11.2 update comes out, the problems I encountered will be corrected.

Good luck to others in this thread. :-)

mauro16 Author

Level 1

15 points

Nov 23, 2015 12:28 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

well, in my case two distinct apple service providers said:

1) apple tests do no show hardware failures

2) we cannot reproduce the problem

so we will not make any repair.

I believe more to 1) than to 2) since if they had played just a bit with the mac they should be easily able to see the behavior.

At this point the question is what will I earn by insisting to go back and forth from service providers, assumed i have the time to do this and the will to get angry in this process (and, for both of them, i have not). Consider i bought a windows license and installed it on the computer. Consider with windows things so far seem not so bad as I said above. The computer shows to work entire weeks without a driver crash, to obtain this it seems enough to avoid as much as possible to shut down the computer, since crashes happen right after the boot (could this be an over-heating problem?) . The mac with windows has another annoying behavior, i.e. it is very slow (often it takes more than one minute) to wake from sleep.

I am not so confident that replacing a part will make things better. I could send the computer to apple store, that is far from my town, and pay for shipping. They could give me another computer which could have the same problem, since the percentage of mac pro with this type of problem doesn't seem to be low. Or if i am lucky the computer might be ok, and i'll have to buy another windows license if i want to use it with windows.

Of course if I find again relevant problems i will bring the computer to service, if on the contrary things continue to be quite acceptable i may avoid or delay other discussions with them. If i reboot the computer a number of times i could be able to show the problem, but this is what happen with windows, with mac the behavior is different and not easy to be easily shown (with mac on the contrary usually the freezing happens after at least 4-5 hours from boot).

Nov 23, 2015 1:41 PM in response to mauro16

This message:

windowserver: surface testing disallowed updates for 10 sequential attempts

may be related to auto-brightness adjustment.

If you have that feature enabled, turn it off.

Nov 23, 2015 5:45 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

Grant Bennet-Alder wrote:

This message:

windowserver: surface testing disallowed updates for 10 sequential attempts

may be related to auto-brightness adjustment.

If you have that feature enabled, turn it off.

It's not true. The auto-brighness features is already disabled, but Mac freezes again.

Nov 23, 2015 5:53 PM in response to mauro16

I'm completely agree with you mauro16,

I've already call Apple Care several times, and now I've to take Mac to the Apple Store this friday.

But the problem will be that is very difficult to re-creeate problem. because could be after 3 hours from boot

but also 3 days...

The only thing that I've done, is make a video with iPhone that shows exactly the hour of freeze, and

taking data from console, for show this to the genius bar.

But sincerely I'm not sure that this thing will help me to solve problems.

I'm very upset to see what Apple doesn't consider the problem, because

internet and discussion forums are FULL of people with this issue...

Good luck to me..

Max

Nov 23, 2015 5:59 PM in response to Paul Rutherford1

Paul Rutherford1 wrote:

To provide additional info about the problem I encountered with screen jerkiness with 10.11.1 update, I'm guessing it's a software problem because I reverted back to 10.10.5 and having no problems. I also had no problems after updating to 10.11.0. It's only after updating to 10.11.1 that I started having problems. I'm now hoping that when the 10.11.2 update comes out, the problems I encountered will be corrected.

Good luck to others in this thread. :-)

I've installed 10.10.5 and the problem is present.... I think it's a hardware issue...

Max

shing123

Level 1

8 points

Nov 23, 2015 6:06 PM in response to maxcarella

Its been more than a year, this problem is persisting. And it's a pretty serious one. Saying, going to the apple genius bar over and over again is not a solution. Best case scenario we have a legit apple store near where we are and set aside a couple days of working time go there and back. One guy on the forum already exchanged his new mac pro 5 times! Worst case u do not have a legit apple store and have to go to the authorise repair people, which will take even longer. And then set aside a couple of hours configuring from time machine. I can go on and on. You end up spending days trying to diagnose the issue or calling apple support still ending up with a machine that will or will not crash. I think its unreasonable for apple to let their new mac pro customers diagnose the problem. I have been using macs for so long, this is the first mac pro I bought with hard earn cash and it turns out to be so unreliable.

Nov 23, 2015 6:16 PM in response to shing123

shing123 wrote:

Its been more than a year, this problem is persisting. And it's a pretty serious one. Saying, going to the apple genius bar over and over again is not a solution. Best case scenario we have a legit apple store near where we are and set aside a couple days of working time go there and back. One guy on the forum already exchanged his new mac pro 5 times! Worst case u do not have a legit apple store and have to go to the authorise repair people, which will take even longer. And then set aside a couple of hours configuring from time machine. I can go on and on. You end up spending days trying to diagnose the issue or calling apple support still ending up with a machine that will or will not crash. I think its unreasonable for apple to let their new mac pro customers diagnose the problem. I have been using macs for so long, this is the first mac pro I bought with hard earn cash and it turns out to be so unreliable.

I am completely agree with you, and this is the reason because I think that I will lose my time taking Mac to the Apple Store for troubleshooting,

but in the meantime I don't understand why Apple ignore completely the issue.

Is there anyone "official" on forum?

Does exist some e-mail address to send some specific issue?

Max

Nov 23, 2015 6:31 PM in response to maxcarella

Well, another data point is that I have the entry level Mac Pro (late 2013) which has AMD FirePro D300 GPUs. If some of you have higher end GPUs, maybe that has something to do with any problems encountered, but so far I'm not having any problems on 10.10.5 and didn't have any problems on it prior to the 10.11.1 update.

Nov 23, 2015 7:31 PM in response to Paul Rutherford1

I also have the dual AMD FirePro D300 gfx, I encountered the freezing wheel from the very beginning almost 2 years ago. We had lots of MacOSX iterations since then which didn't help.

Sometimes it happens twice a day, sometimes it happens only once a week.

I also think it's a gfx-issue, as the whole systems keeps running fine - only the spinning wheel blocks the finder and forces to make a power-cycle.

Slokkie

Level 1

4 points

Nov 24, 2015 12:38 AM in response to peteracpacpacp

Hi peteracpacpacp

I also think it's a gfx-issue, as the whole systems keeps running fine - only the spinning wheel blocks the finder and forces to make a power-cycle.

The problem you describe is exactly the problem we have, multiple freeze's a day and none for a week. I think this is the reason this problem isn't recognised yet, because it doesn't look like a hardware error and you keep on searching for software related problems (or even take it for granted)

Slokkie

Level 1

4 points

Nov 24, 2015 4:28 AM in response to Slokkie

Hi All,

I just clean installed on 1 of my 3 Mac Pro's having this problem with El Capitan 10.11.1 and also here GUI freeze within 30 minutes.

Only the system.log is showing better info about the problem.

every 30 seconds this message appears in the log: WindowServer [199]: GPU Driver appears to be hung (over 5 continuous seconds of unreadiness)

The reason I don't run 10.11 on my mac's is because of having a production environment where not all software is ready for 10.11

But at least El Capitan is giving me a proper error in the system.log

mauro16 Author

Level 1

15 points

Nov 24, 2015 5:31 AM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

I mentioned the message

windowserver: surface testing disallowed updates for 10 sequential attempts

in my first post of may, 16. Actually it appears in logs when having freezing with mac os, but is not the only one and probably is not the most important one. The typical log i found with mac os yosemite is the following

Sep 5 14:24:59 Mac-Pro-di-Mauro kernel[0]: Sound assertion - 1002:aab0 FIFO error (Stream 0)

Sep 5 14:25:00 Mac-Pro-di-Mauro.local WindowServer[150]: Surface testing disallowed updates for 10 sequential attempts...

or alternatively a gpu hang like the following

Aug 18 17:01:03 Mac-Pro-di-Mauro kernel[0]: Sound assertion - 1002:aab0 FIFO error (Stream 0)

Aug 18 17:01:09 Mac-Pro-di-Mauro kernel[0]: [6:0:0] GPU HangState 0x00000000, HangFlags 0x00000004: IndividualEngineHang 0, NonEngineBlockHang 0, FenceNotRetired 1, PerEngineReset 0, FullAsicReset 1

Aug 18 17:01:09 Mac-Pro-di-Mauro kernel[0]: ** GPU ASIC Log Start **

With el capitan 10.11.0 a typical log was the following

Oct 13 23:40:27 Mac-Pro-di-Mauro kernel[0]: Sound assertion - 1002:aab0 FIFO error (Stream 0)

Oct 13 23:40:27 Mac-Pro-di-Mauro WindowServer[162]: Surface testing disallowed updates for 10 sequential attempts...

Oct 13 23:40:33 Mac-Pro-di-Mauro WindowServer[162]: GPU Driver appears to be hung (over 5 continuous seconds of unreadiness)

Oct 13 23:40:37 --- last message repeated 872 times ---

Oct 13 23:40:37 Mac-Pro-di-Mauro com.apple.WebKit.WebContent[3461]: [23:40:37.212] <<<< IQ-CA >>>> piqca_setUsePreQueue: (0x7ff844161a00) rejecting report of layer being serviced - IQ has not yet begun to update

Oct 13 23:40:37 Mac-Pro-di-Mauro com.apple.WebKit.WebContent[3461]: [23:40:37.212] FigAgglomeratorSetObjectForKey signalled err=-16020 (kFigStringConformerError_ParamErr) (NULL key) at /Library/Caches/com.apple.xbs/Sources/CoreMedia/CoreMedia-1731.15.4/Prototypes/ LegibleOutput/FigAgglomerator.c line 92

Oct 13 23:40:37 Mac-Pro-di-Mauro WindowServer[162]: GPU Driver appears to be hung (over 5 continuous seconds of unreadiness)

Oct 13 23:40:39 --- last message repeated 561 times ---

mac pro late 2013 freezes with spinning wheel