After installing OS 10.11.4 my Mac becomes sluggish. I check the Activity Monitor and see that the "Keychain Circle Notification" is not responding. Force quitting hangs the entire Mac and I'm forced to do a hard restart. Does anyone have any ideas on this or we just at the mercy of Apple rolling out a fix?
iMac with Retina 5K display, OS X El Capitan (10.11.4)
Adding to my original post in this thread. Mail App has basically become unusable. Switching between mail boxes, searching for anything, dragging and dropping files to emails, and bullet pointing or numbering text inside an email you are composing brings down the entire App. In the Activity Monitor Mail shows up as "Not responding". In the same activity monitor I also see that "loginwindow", "Keychain Circle Notification", and "EscrowSecurityAlert" are all also not responding (I have no clue as to what they are). Force quitting does not work, you have to do a full hard restart. Microsoft Excel and Adobe Acrobat Pro refuse to open.
Adding to my original post in this thread. Mail App has basically become unusable. Switching between mail boxes, searching for anything, dragging and dropping files to emails, and bullet pointing or numbering text inside an email you are composing brings down the entire App. In the Activity Monitor Mail shows up as "Not responding". In the same activity monitor I also see that "loginwindow", "Keychain Circle Notification", and "EscrowSecurityAlert" are all also not responding (I have no clue as to what they are). Force quitting does not work, you have to do a full hard restart. Microsoft Excel and Adobe Acrobat Pro refuse to open.
Since installing 10.11.4, my machine has been unstable. One app will hang, then another, then the entire system hangs. Only a hard boot will bring it back.. Sometimes, the system hangs when trying to wake from sleep. I have had five calls to Apple and been in touch with a senior advisor; however, the problem still persists. I have reinstalled the operating system, updated all apps, delete caches and similar files, and reset the SMC. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
I have exactly the same problem. Force quitting the stalled apps doesn't help. They just hang serially. The prime offenders for me appear to be Mail and Safari; that is, they are generally the first apps to hang. Activity Monitor shows CPU usage off the chart. A hard restart is the only remedy. Lately, this is happening half a dozen times each day. Is there a fix?
The senior Apple advisor that I spoke with ran system logging software on my machine and sent it to their software engineering department. I forwarded the link to this thread to him, and he said that he would forward that along as well. I have taken extensive notes on the problem, which he said would help them diagnosis the problem and find a solution. I hope that the fact that all of us has this issue will make it more likely that they will fix this.
For me, I usually have two or three days before a hard boot is required, but I don't use Mac Mail or Safari. Perhaps switching to third party apps might help you a bit. The problem seems to be a bit more frequent when I am running Moom or Bettersnaptool (apps that let you manage window placement). If I get any information, I will certainly post it to this thread. If anyone else has any ideas, please let us know!
To everyone on this thread. The problem continues and in fact gets worse when you introduce any Microsoft 365 product into the mix. I have contacted my local Apple Store (North Michigan Ave. Chicago) and was told that there was nothing they could do. They recommend a complete reinstall of the entire system and all of my apps. 😮 This is a huge setback to my business. I have not installed 10.11.4 on any of my other machines. The only one that seems to be just fine is my Macbook Pro. At this point I am prepping to wipe my iMac and do a clean install this weekend if possible. Hugely disappointed in Apple for the lack of attention.
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My system instability continues, which is frustrating. Has anyone tried resetting the NVRAM? A friend of mine who has substantial IT experience said that he had this problem in an earlier version of OS X and resetting the NVRAM (which, in the past was called PRAM) solved the problem. I am hesitant to do this without a clearer sense of whether or not this might be useful. (Instructions on doing so can be found at this article: How to Reset NVRAM on your Mac - Apple Support.)
In the meantime, I have been rebooting my machine every couple of days. Its a terrible solution, but prevents the machine from hanging down at inopportune moments.
Mail App, Skype or iTunes are also sometimes unusable on my iMac. In the Activity Monitor they appear as "Not responding", like "Keychain Circle Notification", and "EscrowSecurityAlert". Force quitting does not work, I also have to force a full hard restart.
But this morning, I found something interesting that helped me in the Activity Monitor : I shot a process called "disnoted", that was consuming 350% of my processor !
As soon I shot it, everything defreezed instantly.
I don't know exactly what it is, but it worked perfectly.
I hope it will help you.
I had the same issue that Amacuser2568 and spodonahue describe. After reading this thread, I tried resetting the NVRAM, and it worked like a charm. Thanks for the advice!
Has anyone seen any improvement by installing 10.11.5? I haven't installed yet, and I hope it fixes this awful problem.
I have thad the same issue. I was in the beta program and posted it there and got no responses at all to this problem. Unfortunately it seems to be present in the normal public release of 10.11.5 as well. Anyway, I deleted anything to do with Spotlight a week ago, reindexed my hard drive and the problem seemed to go away. Until today. Only 3 days after I installed the update from the public beta to the general release.
Exactly the same problems are occurring as you guys mention, with the same two apps showing as non-responsive.
Nobody, I repeat, nobody has even bothered to offer any ideas on this in the 2-3 months I have been talking about this problem, so I don't hold out much hope.
By the way, resetting the NVRAM and SMC does nothing.
I installed 10.11.5, and the problem has not gone away. The senior advisor that I am working since late March has replied to some of my queries, usually after a week or more. All he has said is that engineering is working on the problem, though he had me run some diagnostics. I am frustrated that we are supposed to just live with a unstable system. I left Windows years ago because the OS was so unstable. Perhaps its time to go back.
Try the reindexing. Oh, I just remembered something. Do you have any other users on your mac? There is a suggestion out there that you need to log in as the other users after a software update to ensure all users are updated as well. I haven't done that myself this time so will do that first... because I don't have the foggiest about Windows 10 and am getting too long in the tooth to be bothered re-learning Windows - especially when it is so different to my last (XP)
I have the same problem. About two hard reboots a day.
Mac Book Pro Retina 13' Early 2015
10.11.4. 3.1 I7 16GB 1T
Hi Dove - and any others reading this:
Distnoted is definitely the one hogging all the CPU and killing it fixes the problem immediately. There are usually several instances of it in Activity Monitor, so force quit the one that says it has been running for hours (if you have one). From some of the reading I have done around the place this is not necessarily a problem with distnoted, it appears some other apps can cause it to go manic. Finding which ones is the problem.
At the time mine started to grind to a halt - I recognise the symptoms now and get into console and AM straight away - my CalNCService was going nuts and recording a time out error every 5 seconds.
I googled this service and found this tip:
http://www.dgkapps.com/blog/osx-tips/osx-tips-turn-off-disable-calendaragent-fro m-the-command-line/
And also this thread on Apple Support:
Recentsd and Calncservice processes Yosemite
I will be trying the first option as I use Outlook and don't need my notifications duplicated. Will report back if it fails.
There is a mention of killing any or all of your notifications in system preferences.
There was something else but my mind has suddenly gone blank - like my console does then this happens!
By the way, killing the distnoted service also fixed the keychaincircle and escrowsecurityalert that were not responding. I am not sure if they are linked as there is nothing when I google that.
EDIT - remembered what I forgot! I have an MBP running exact same OS and apps and have none of this issue on that....
"Keychain Circle Notification" not responding.
