macOS Sierra freeze on iMac late 2009 using Safari

iMac Freezes when using Safari:

• Completely independant of website
• Completely independant of Plugins, third-Party or other Software (nor malware nor whatever was mentioned in this tread) => Can reproduce this after a clean install
• Is 100% reproducable

Here is my spindump of the Windowserver

https://lameee.de/shared/da2fd855e7ee226db19b6140458ccc67cf9f58ca630de5467d40bf2 a3adbeab6

Can anybody find anything suspicious in there?

Hello All,

So since my post of 3rd October, after doing disk repair in Recovery mode, I have not had a single crash whilst using Safari...

...until today. Had left my iMac unattended for half an hour or so. Came back to it, with two tabs open, and after a couple of minutes, completely unresponsive, just the mouse buzzing around.

So it's back again!

I use to save ALL my old Safari and every other browser for that matter for years.

When Safari would cause issues, I'd use one of the others. One time almost all of them were having problems but a couple obscure browsers I happened to have. NOW, I only use about 8 other browsers instead of 18.

Safari Technology Preview

Firefox

SeaMonkey

Epic

Brave

Waterfox

Chrome

Opera

I'd suggest that if you find one or two you really like - keep it on a thumb drive, just as a quick backup to when things go sideways for apple.

Recently I had this issue and I managed to press Option-Command-Escape and forced Safari to close. The system recovered a few seconds later and I did not have to restart. This seems to indicate that the problem is related to Safari.

I've found with my laptops - since the last couple updates - it's whether or not the TABS are PINNED, but then again sometimes Gmail still causes me issues. I've always got 1-3 Gmail tabs open at once in addition to all my other tabs which can be from 3-30.

Also having this issue. Sound will continue playing, mouse moves but cannot interact. Can ssh into machine, and no obvious load issues. I'll try killing the window server next time and see if that restarts things.

I notice it only happens if I have a game open (World of Warcraft eg.) in another desktop. So if I switch over to mail or itunes, it'll sometimes freeze up on me. Perhaps there's an interaction with the new metal driver? Or maybe it really is just the window server flaking out.

Going to have to say that this is definitely a bug in sierra itself -- there's never a reason for this sort of level of crash across so many different setups, there are a huge swath of sierra lockup reports appearing. Avoiding any voodoo-hand-wavy fixes that will make things worse, and hopefully apple will react with an actual patch.

Do you guys experience similarly odd swap management during the freeze? (sometimes I am lucky and get a semi-freeze -> thus the screenshots)

So basically during the freeze the swap usage goes down while at the same time memory usage of kernel_task dramatically goes up - does not seem like a big surprise that this behaviour leads to problems.

As sometime ago reported in this thread I had exactly the same issued with my late 2014 27' 5K iMac. However I refused to install third party browsers next to Safari, since after all it is the MacOS including Safari that attracted me to buy this machine. In case I needed Firefox, Chrome or the likes I should have bought a Windows operated computer. The problem persisted after a clean reinstall of Sierra, which caused me to go back and clean reinstall Yosemite, where I kept on experiencing the same problem. I went through this whole process supported by the Apple support team. After realising that the problem persisted after going back to Yosemite. The support team did ask me to bring the iMac in to a repair shop. At the repair shop the logic board was replaced. I am now running for a week without any problem at all.

It would be interesting to know if anybody in this thread has taken the 2009 27" iMac in for such a repair and see if that fixed the problem. Anyway, I do wish for all who have these nasty problems, that they will be resolved. Apple states Sierra runs on 2009 iMAC's than they are obliged to make it happen. I certainly do do not look forward for my 3.5 k$ iMac to be obsoleted like this 7 years after it is purchased.

My 2015 27" iMac has been in for testing and passed all hardware tests. It's now had 650mb of crash logs sent to tier 3 Apple technicians... they were supposed to have an answer on Friday but didn't get back to us. I will have a follow up tomorrow, as I will make sure IT calls

Having posted a message on Dec 1 on an uninterupted performance of the imac I can now inform you all that I got a freeze again. This time it cannot be related to Safari as this was de-activated. The 2 programs that were active were Firefox and Mail. While working in Mail the imac froze again. Starting to feel pretty nervous that this might happen again and my believe in Apple delivering top quality products has taken a considerable beating.

I can only add that since I replaced Safari with Firefox I have had no freezes when scrolling WEB pages, but......

I've experienced one freeze when scroling through a mail in Mail. And I've also had a freeze when scrolling through a list of films (thumbnails) in iTunes Store (iTunes 12.5.3.17).

I've been using Chrome with no issues, other than its Chrome (very much prefer Safari)

I'm going for it. Unlikely to be worse