Q: macOS Sierra freeze on iMac late 2009 using Safari

I did a fresh install of Sierra on a 2009 iMac 27" after the install I only opened safari and started watching videos and the freezing DID occur.

So I think it has nothing to do with any add-ons or plugins. Since it did it with a clean install this issue is in the OS itself which is pretty sad. I also had to revert to El Capitan since my iMac froze 3-4 times a day.

For me it usually happened when I was watching a video and the video was in a tab with was not open. I really hope apple solves this soon.

It seems like a number f people with SSDs installed are having this issue but it also seems to be occurring with rotational HDs so I am not sure if the SSDs are the culprit. I ything non-stock in Safari and so far so good after about 30 hours.

Yeah i did notice that as well that many people here have ssd installed, i do as well also. But it happened with the original hard drive as well. So i doubt it that the ssd is causing it...

I have been using Chrome for 2 days now and no crashes.

It seems that problem is really the Safari

regards

All,

I'm migrating to G Chrome either. It works better (at least with G Suite apps). No crashes, no "freezes", nor lags so far.

Safari is left for personal pages only, where not that many active context and/or plug-ins required (e.g. G Talk).

This is very strange, that Safari 10 is so slow and resources consuming: I truly love this browser, it's really geeky cool, but it's behaviour is unpredictable and unresponsive with the latest updates...

I hope someone from Apple reads this thread and has enough info now to pass to Dev team.

Thanks

Hi riadfromhabsheim,

I have a 21.5" iMac late 2009, but the same message in the log as the last entry before I hard rebooted.

I tried ssh-ing to the machine and sending a killall -HUP WindowServer. That didn't restart the WindowServer (it did when I tried the same comment when no freeze). A kill -9 did stop the mouse from moving, but didn't help me restart the WindowServer.

Right before the freeze there appear to be a couple of cloudd messages in the syslog:

cloudd[807]: notify name "com.apple.security.view-change.PCS" has been registered 20 times - this may be a leak

cloudd[807]: notify name "com.apple.ProtectedCloudStorage.HaveCredentials" has been registered 20 times - this may be a leak

Then the spindump, not sure if triggered by the kill command or automatically generated:

spindump[407]: Saved userspace_watchdog_timeout.spin report for WindowServer version ??? (???) to /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/WindowServer_2016-10-06-192651_iMac-van-xxxxx.u serspace_watchdog_timeout.spin

Note the ???, that's what I see in the logs rather than a real version.

Hello

it looks like I have the same problem wih my iMac late 2013.

It started with Sleep Wake failure and yesterday evening I had 2 freezes, usb mouse and keyborad not responding, the BT trackad responded for maybe one minute or two then stopped. Hard reboot was the only solution.

Maybe a clean install would help but the process hurts so much.

I am using 15 inch MacBook Pro Retina 2015 with dual VGA. I am experiencing the same problem which I notice always happen if I open some tab / windows in Safari and doing mission control.

I have tried using Safari Technology Preview, still no luck.

I tried the clean install, but this did not help at all.

I have two almost identical late 2009 21,5" iMacs, one with the ATI Radeon HD4670 card, the other with the basic on-board graphics. The on-board graphics machine does not suffer from freezes, the machine with the ATI Radeon does.

Anyone else with ATI Radeon graphics & freezes?

riadfromhabsheim, maybe editing the thread title (omitting iMac late 2009) would make it clearer that the problem isn't related to a specific mac.