OS X 10.11.4 freezing and/or crashing while using Safari

Thanks. I did exactly as you said, installed smcFanControl and set the min fan speed manually to 1500 rpm but it just crashed on me. Half an hour before, I was doing some pretty CPU/GPU intense stuff and it held fine. Now it froze when I was just playing a video from my hard drive. This is nuts.

At the time of crash, smcFanControl's menubar thingy was showing 47°C and 0 rpm.

Trying 1700 rpm now as Alvin777 suggests.

EDIT: 10.11.5 just came out, going to try this first

Hi. I just updated to 10.11.5 and brought the fans automatically back to OS X. With iStat temp monitor, OS X seems to be revving the fans at the proper rpms this time. The rpms used to not go beyond 1200rpms before no matter how hot the ODD, HDD and CPU were. I feel it's been fixed with the update but it'll have to be tested for a week (16 hours a day) on Safari with videos and heavy 3D apps.

God bless, Rev. 21:4

Unfortunately it froze again (with garbled screen) when I woke up the iMac. It's still not fixed yet it seems under 10.11.5 if this is an OS X issue. OS X when it's in control of the fans, seems to not rev them fast enough, probably, when it's waking up from sleep (I think if the fans are set manually, even if the Mac sleeps, it's not going to rev down the fans, it's constant). The fans are on manual again, all at 1700rpm. If this still crashes, the next setting I plan to set it to is 2000rpm then 2100rpm if that fails.

Hi Mirek,

my fan never goes below 1500 RPM as I set up in smcFanControl. Haven't seen any freezes since Friday. Yesterday night used Safari (Youtube) without any problems. I think Mac hangs when fan stops (0 RPM) and after that heavy load starts (like video or similar).

Hey everyone,

I just installed OS X 10.11.5, gonna run Premiere Pro, After Effects, Photoshop etc. to see how it goes.

Let's hope it's fixed!

iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2015)

Processor: 4 GHz Intel Core i7

Memory: 32 GB 1867 MHz DDR3

Graphics: AMD Radeon R9 M395x 4096 MB

tried again with the latest beta (released today), still as crashy as ever. I hope you have more luck than me, but somehow I doubt it.

My iMac just froze again, I was watching a youtube video(Safari) and suddenly it froze and rebooted itself. 😟

Other apps I had open: Mail, Slack, Spotify and Cinema 4D.

It was working stable all day and night.

So version 10.11.5 (15F34) doesn't fix the problem.

Hi. I just set my fans manually to 1900rpm (all) with smcFanControl. All tests on hardware passed (Prime 95, Cinebench, gputest, RAM test, hardrive, gpu memory test, Apple's hardware test, etc.). I did get a kernel panic while booting 10.11.5. 1900rpm seems to be stable so far but it's not very hot at this time, the real test is around in the afternoon.

My guess is, El Capitan's kernel has a very serious bug that's related to controlling the fans. I'm guessing, even if it's on manual or OS X's auto settings, the fans are either stopping or go into a very low rpm, overheating something probably on the power supply area (not the HDD, nor the GPU nor the CPU).

I hope and pray, this very serious bug (if this theory is correct) gets to be fixed in version 10.12 which is thankfully coming.

God bless. Proverbs 31

Coming this fall... 😟

http://www.macrumors.com/roundup/os-x-10-12/

Well I have finally given up on waiting for Apple to fix this freezing issue in 10.11.4. I have experienced multiple freezing under multiple scenarios (youtube, safari, preview, non browser freezes) over the past 6 weeks or so since upgrading to 10.11.4. Unfortunately I only have 10.11.4 on my Time Machine backup so.......

I'm going to have the Genius Bar load Yosemite 10.10.x on my MBP 2011 and then reload all my data from the back up and hope for the best. I'll have to live with an older version of XCODE that is compatible with 10.10 and hope I don't have major hassles.

I'll post in a few days on the process and stability of Yosemite. BTW I heard today that some iPads are freezing as well.....geez Apple you used to be so solid, I went for over 5 years with my MBP without OS failures.

Tom

Upgraded to 10.11.5. No freezes, but fan is behaving strange... Sometimes CPU Core 1 and CPU Core 2 have temperature > 105 C, and fan has 0 RPM. Fan control app smcFanControl doesn't work, so I replaced it with http://www.crystalidea.com/macs-fan-control

Trying to keep CPU Proximity below 50 C.

Hi. It seems (my best guess) to be an El Capitan kernel bug (possibly not a driver bug related to fan control but it's most likely something to do with 3D implementation in the kernel coz' it seems ok in Safe Mode) related to controlling the fans, particularly the GPU fan. El Capitan doesn't seem to rev the fans fast enough on auto when OS X is booted/loaded nor does it rev it fast enough upon boot (it would crash as well usually from a cold boot). I'm not using Macs Fan Control with this setting at 35 to 36 Celsius (climate). These setting are based on branded cooler fans' maximum rpms for each component:

ODD at 2000rpm

HDD at 4500rpm

CPU at 2500rpm

So far so good. I hope these new settings last more than 4 days (16 hours a day, Safari with lots of tabs, two windows, some heavy 3D games and html5 videos). It's been tested many times with Cinebench 15. The ODD fan seems to be the one cooling the GPU. When ODD and the other fans were set to auto in El Capitan, the rpm was below 1600 and it crashed with garbled screen.

God bless. Proverbs 31

You have talked about temperatures of 35 or 36º C - is that the room temperature at the location of your mac? I imagine not, but just in case...

The tech specs put the operating temperature between 10 and 35º C, so 36º would not only be very hard for a human, it would be marginally above the specs for the computer as well.

Hi. This setting still crashed just minutes after a cold reboot. I think El Capitan didn't rev the fans high enough upon cold boot. Now I'll retain the settings but I won't shut/switch off this 6 year old iMac.

I got to return it to normal (with garbled screen) by booting into Safe Mode from there launching Macs Fan Control change the setting a bit, just to let OS X know that the fans are now in manual control. Returned the settings to 2000, 4500 and 2500rpms coz' these setting should be able to cool it enough even under heavy load. After that, I waited for the GPU to go below 80 Celsius (they say that below that is optimal even under heavy load).

I'm just worried when it sleeps, El Capitan might override the fans again (maybe via it's kernel it's able to override any fan app) and overheat the GPU again but got to try different things. If this still fails, I'll switch off sleep and put the brightness to the lowest (maybe increase the ODD and CPU fans too) to conserve energy though that's gonna' make the bearings have shorter life for the HDD and fans.

God bless. Rev. 21:4

There are a number of things which could cause an issue like this, but if your system is stable and it is only being experienced when using Safari, it would suggest a Plug in related cause, more than likely a Flash related issue (if you have Flash installed).

I was experiencing some glitches in Safari, I uninstalled Flash Player properly (there is a dedicated download file from Adobe for uninstalling Flash entirely) and everything went back to working fine.

If so, I would uninstall Flash Player and download Chrome (which has built in Flash compatibility without the need of Flash Player itself). That's what I use for BBC iPlayer as that requires Flash to play shows. Here's the link to Adobe's Support page with the download links for the different Flash Uninstaller Files (there's one for OS X 10.6 and over and one for Pre 10.6 variants):

https://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/uninstall-flash-player-mac-os.html