Safari keeps crashing/freezing after install of El Capitan

palegreenghosts wrote:

@Unloadedone

The advice is appreciated but this was discussed several pages ago and everybody who had been suffering from GUI tab closing freezes still had them in the Safari TP version. A quick summary: Some believed it fixed their issue as they didn't have freezes for days, whereas they were seeing daily freezes with the regular version of Safari. However, there wasn't a single person who believed they had a fix that didn't end up posting the unfortunate news that the GUI freezes returned in exactly the same fashion as before.

Discouraging news for sure. I tried it (STP) once before and had freezing come back but an update was pushed out a few days ago and this one was better for me. I'm still putting it through torture tests but it's holding up well. Wasn't the case with the prior version. It was just more of the same. I was hoping that could be the case for others regarding this latest STP update. If this doesn't help, I guess this does point to our worst fears. While I'm still hoping this proves not to be true, the issue is pervasive and the amount of time this has been going on is alarming.

how can you test the issue? i'm thinking to take my computer to the service or a local consumer committee in my country so i want to show the problem easily

burakkcr wrote:

how can you test the issue? i'm thinking to take my computer to the service or a local consumer committee in my country so i want to show the problem easily

I Just basically open up a bunch of YouTube and daily motion pages and played videos and exited them and closed tabs repeatedly. Then I'd leave Youtube and daily motions tabs open on my machine and leave it be for hours and return (not practice of at the store) and so far no crashes with the Safari TP update released a few days ago.

@Unloadedone

I strongly suggest everyone give Safari technology preview a try before ruling its hardware related.

Apologies, it was the message I'm quoting from above that led me to suspect you were just suggesting everyone should try the TP in general, not specifically the latest version. Your message before that did make this distinction but without the clarification that you had no success with version of TP before this I believed you were giving a broader recommendation. Please report back on what you find from the latest release.

Not to be a pessimist but I remember the same relief with the initial TP release where some commenters said they still hadn't had a freeze after days of trying to freeze it. Like I mentioned in a previous comment, everybody eventually had the same freeze and, ultimately, couldn't rely on Safari TP in a working environment. I love to be proven wrong so let us know otherwise.

@palegreenghosts,

Oh please try to seem less condescending. First of all, I've been monitoring this thread for months before I even made my first post here. Second of all, there are no indications of it being a hardware problem. Even if it were only one-configuration machines, there would still be 50/50 chances of it being either hardware, or driver issues. During the freezes, the cursor still active, which means the graphics card still working. CPU is working too, but it's busy killing a dozens of idle processes and generating a huge spindump log file with thousands of lines at once. That's why the freeze even occurs (instead of continue working under heat and fan spinning like crazy).

If you have time to analyse my spindump, you can download the file here: https://cloud.mail.ru/public/42XH/ZHmz6YHfy

@higgsb0son

I don't have anything mentioning GPU in my logs during the freeze. I also just had the freeze during a closing of a YouTube tab which didn't contain any video (just a user profile page) and trying to return to a non-video page.

palegreenghosts wrote:

@Unloadedone

I strongly suggest everyone give Safari technology preview a try before ruling its hardware related.

Apologies, it was the message I'm quoting from above that led me to suspect you were just suggesting everyone should try the TP in general, not specifically the latest version. Your message before that did make this distinction but without the clarification that you had no success with version of TP before this I believed you were giving a broader recommendation. Please report back on what you find from the latest release.

Not to be a pessimist but I remember the same relief with the initial TP release where some commenters said they still hadn't had a freeze after days of trying to freeze it. Like I mentioned in a previous comment, everybody eventually had the same freeze and, ultimately, couldn't rely on Safari TP in a working environment. I love to be proven wrong so let us know otherwise.

Yes no problem. I should have been more specific in the prior post. It's still may be too early to tell with this latest release but I'm cautiously optimistic. I had that same experience with the last STP release. Relief from the problem for a bit then it came right back like the monster at the end of a horror movie.

I will let everyone how it goes. So far so good.

I just had the freeze with the latest TP release two hours ago.

Ottius wrote:

I just had the freeze with the latest TP release two hours ago.

Darn! Still crash free here. Entering day 4. This is a new record for me. Lol!

Same problem here continues. I have installed the Safari Technology preview yesterday and the computer crashed again minutes ago!! Nothing seems to fix it.... APPLE!!

lamfra wrote:

Same problem here continues. I have installed the Safari Technology preview yesterday and the computer crashed again minutes ago!! Nothing seems to fix it.... APPLE!!

Still crash free here. My record is still holding. However I don't want to jinx myself. So it seems it's not a universal fix for all which is highly frustrating to read.

Is anyone beta testing El Capitan 10.11.5 and if so, is the issue still happening?

I may as well throw my hat into this ring, too. I've been having the issue where closing a tab would freeze my MBP for up to a minute or two (sometimes less). I never noticed if it was only involving sites with media, like YouTube, but having read through pretty much every page of this discussion, I'm certainly keeping my eye out for that.

The last two times I experienced the issue were yesterday and just now, even while writing this post. Both times, I was, indeed, closing a YouTube tab, and my laptop froze, although this time the freeze only lasted a few seconds. I'm using the latest Safari Technology Preview. (I downloaded STP the day it was first released hoping it would fix this issue. Unfortunately, it didn't.) I don't remember anything else about the situation: if the tab was foreground or background, if I stayed in STP while the close was happening or if I tried to cmd-tab away during the closing, etc. All I know is I closed a YouTube tab and my MBP froze for a bit.

I don't recall if the previous 27 pages of posts mentioned this or not, but the freeze does seem to be only visual, in a way. If I keep typing during the freeze, then what I typed will show up after the computer starts working again.

I've had this issue for quite a while, now. I don't recall if I experienced it before El Capitan, but it is very possible, given how long it's been happening to me.

Laptop specs, according to About This Mac:

OS X El Capitan 10.11.4

MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014)

2.5 GHz Intel Core i7

16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3

Intel Iris Pro 1536 MB

You are correct, only the display is frozen (and not even the mouse cursor). Connecting to the machine from another allows you to see that normal activity is going on.

@echosa

I don't recall if the previous 27 pages of posts mentioned this or not, but the freeze does seem to be only visual, in a way. If I keep typing during the freeze, then what I typed will show up after the computer starts working again.

Interesting. Lots of comments do refer to it as a 'GUI' freeze which defines it as freezing only the graphical/visual aspects of the system. However, while I was aware that any processes that were underway continue during the freeze, I wasn't aware of any non-remote keystrokes being registered - which seems to be the case for you. As the mouse cursor can move (which is unusual, considering everything else in the GUI freezes, including the time display) can you confirm whether any mouse clicks or swipes had any effect once the freeze ends? Over the years I've been familiar with temporary freezes that register keystrokes and mouse clicks unleashing them in a horrible burst at the end of the freeze. I haven't seen anything like that in this case but haven't consciously had an active textfield when the freeze occurred for me to purposely test keystrokes being registered.

unleashing them in a horrible burst at the end of the freeze.

That certainly seems to be the case here. I can't speak for mouse gestures, but any cmd-tabbing I did all seem to happen at once. I'll try to remember to do some mouse gestures next time it happens.