High Sierra freeze

A few weeks ago, I said removing old "kext" files from Mac HD > Library >Extensions fixed my problem, sadly it didn't. (Although, it probably needed the cleaning anyway.)

My disillusion was caused by the issues appearing more often as time continued. It was almost as if it could be a temperature problem, but the temps appear normal.

So, I went "old school". My boot drive was about 66% full. In theory, that shouldn't have made a difference. Regardless, I moved all of my iTunes media to an adjacent partition.

Surprisingly it helped a bit, even after running all day. But, it wasn't perfect, just less frequent. What was a moment of joy, promptly jumped into dismay when my SIri and its predictable "SiriNCService" error on the second Siri inquiry. Often, not responding after that.

** With the extra large amounts of space (it took "about this Mac - Storage" a longtime to show correct free space), I suspect APFS to be the culprit. **

I do not know if I have the patience to revert my boot drive back to HFS+. It sounds dangerous.

One tiny moment of success was a friend's "frozen blank boot screen" in Yosemite was fixed by the deleting of the old "kext".

In summary, my...

with 10.13.3 beta, is still freezing. Sue me, as if 10.13.3 is a secret.

10.13 is a mitigated disaster, you're required to issue a 10.13.3 in an attempt to fix the Macs for thousands of your users.

With every update, I had hoped it would be fixed.

As much as getting out of the beta program and reverting to HFS+ and Sierra 10.12 is like backing up a long train on a Sierra pass in a blizzard, but it looks like a better option so I can continue with my life.

Spending so much time babysitting a computer is too much like my friends with MS.

Steven Paul "Steve" Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011)

The king has died, the magic is gone, and Camelot has become just another crumbling ancient castle.

A new castle didn't help; it's, already, on weakening ground.

For us, we're left to crumble alone.

I hadn't realised that SSDs were causing these issues as well, as they are supposed to work well with High Sierra. So that is interesting (for those using them).

My desktop hard drives aren't SSD as you need much more storage space than you get with these if you are a film maker. Last night I unplugged all of them and booted the Mac with no problems this morning, or at least not from the Mac.

The hard drives were a different issue as I was promptly reminded that the reason I never turn off one of the hard drives is because its got a dodgy on off switch and refused to mount if switched off. So I then had a fun fifteen minutes persuading it to start up.

When you say you reinstalled Mac OS do you mean that reinstalled High Sierra? Or Sierra? I am guessing that if High Sierra didn't install properly the first time then reinstalling it would fix the problem. When I installed High Sierra I got a message saying it had updated ok but the day after I got a message to re-do the installation. Not sure if that might have anything to do with issues or not.

I did the same with a clean install but installed OS X Yosemite as I had previously downloaded this from the App Store. Sadly the problem still persists. I have noticed it is also related to overheating. I have stripped off the plastic cover I had on and try to keep the machine as cool as possible. After a while it gets hot and then all goes to crap and freezes repeatedly. Really glad it worked for you. Has the problem occurred since you did the fresh install of El Cap? Can you replace or upgrade the graphics cards on a Mac Book Pro or are they soldered in place? BTW this problem was much worse when I ran Windows using Bootcamp. Fans were going nuts. Suggests to me its not software or a memory leak but a firmware issue not solvable for me at least by downgrading. I do note downgrading and wiping my SDD has helped reduce the frequency of the problem. I guess the boffins at Apple are too busy walking into glass doors to have time to fix this. Effectively it has killed my Mac which while vintage has a 2 year old logic board and Scandisk Extreme Pro 1TB SDD (brilliant) and new RAM so I was hoping it would last a while longer though a MS 15" Surface Book 2 is looking mighty attractive but expensive.

FWIW, this is my take on things now. The reason Apple are doing nothing is because there is nothing that can be done. Why? Because there are a massive amount of variables, you only have to look through the thread to see that. People updating ancient Macs to a brand new OS, people using old HDD's and new SSD's not formatted properly for HS etc... I recently bought an iMac Pro with HS preinstalled and I've also updated it with the various patches that have appeared since. Guess what? No problems at all, no freezing, nothing, but here's the thing, I've also updated my other iMac with all the patches and I no longer have a freezing issue with that either. I think the problem lies in certain peripherals being incompatible with HS and no amount of patching by Apple is going to cure that due to the amount of the aforementioned variables.

Hi gefferz, for a valid comparison between your other iMac and iMac Pro we need to know the RAM and screen resolution settings of both. Maybe you aren't experiencing it yet on your iMac Pro because you have more RAM or are not running a scaled res? By patches I assume you mean OS updates, this issue still exists in the latest 10.13.3.

Hi, a month or so ago I reformatted all my external HDDs, and then the HS freezes stopped - yay. Now after being away travelling for a week, the freezes have started again, with a vengeance when I plugged in my WD HDDs. Am therefore wondering if Time Machine is an issue, and when there is a large back-log of back-ups to do, HS is unable to cope. Whatever the case, I'm perplexed, and unhappy that I can't use my back-up disks now. I'll look into HDD firmware updates, which I've never done...

Thanks for posting - yes I discovered this morning that the freeze is nothing to do with desk top hard drives since none of mine were running, but I still got a freeze.

I had one app running after start up and opened another and the Mac froze. I had a 'spinning beach ball of death' but without the spin. I waited four or five minutes and the Mac unfroze and carried on as usual.

Significantly someone on this forum posted to say that they have a new Mac and have no problems with it freezing. Apple upgraded most of their hardware in 2017 (apart from the Mac Pro)

This, coupled with the fact that upgrades to software have not resolved the problem with pre-2017 Macs freezing, would seem to suggest that its a hardware issue? And that no pre-2017 Macs can run High Sierra without crashing?

It seems to me that if you are a Mac computer designer and know the latest Macs work without a problem but all pre-2017 ones won't, then it ought to be fairly easy to work out what that problem is.

Updating to High Sierra meant that I had to update FCP and Compressor as well, so its not just a matter of downgrading to Sierra, even presupposing I can identify all the files that will be dotted around the Mac's system. I'd have to revert to earlier versions of FCP and Compressor as well (and the software would need to un-convert the film files that I'd updated)

All in all a bit of a nightmare

I know 10.13.4 specifically says it was addressing Mac Pro graphics issues so I’m glad to see that at least some of the problems are fixed. There was no mention of any other systems though so I’m guessing the rest of us are still hosed.

Long story short: I have been following this and other threads from time to time. I tried everything, even so far as downgrading the OS, but nothing solved my crashing/freezing problems since upgrading to High Sierra. Then by accident, I discovered that when I was running a particular app, which becomes non-responding right after opening, my MBP (mid-2014 15” retina) didn’t crash anymore. This app consumes 100% of one my CPUs, which is annoying and drains the battery when off the grid, but the system has been 100% stable for weeks now. When I force quit this app my MBP crashes/freezes right away and becomes unstable again.

This is of course not a solution, and I find it hard to recommend to others, but it may be another piece to the puzzle that Apple has not solved so far.

I really hesitate to get too excited but 10.13.6 has actually helped me quite a bit.

10.13.5 was an absolute disaster. Far worse than 10.13.4, to the point that I'd started working on other computers that I have. Sometimes I'd have to restart 4 or 5 times to get it to even boot all the way.

It's only been a few days, and it always seems to be a little better immediately after an upgrade, but while I've seen the telltale signs of it getting close to freezing, I can just stop for working for a few seconds and it seems to get itself back under control.

Again, it's not fixed but it's back to an earlier state of crappy that 10.13.5 had completely ruined.

Well, I guess that's the final nail in my 2010 27" iMac. It was a nice run until Apple completely hosed it up with High Sierra.

Make no mistake about it, High Sierra ruined my iMac. Adding an SSD had brought it back from a gradual slowdown to a highly functioning piece of equipment that I did business on every day. El Capitan? Not a single issue. Sierra? Worked great. Then came High Sierra... Nearly catastrophic problems from Day 1. Downgrading didn't fix the issue.

Even immediately after several of the High Sierra updates, the signs of what this computer was capable of were evident. Booted quickly, apps opened fast, plenty of processing power for the dev work I do. Gradually though, every single update would, within a week or so, start hanging regularly. First it would be if I let the computer sleep, but eventually it wouldn't even boot reliably, sometimes requiring multiple restarts.

I kept hoping they'd finally get the problems worked out since they were similar to what other people were experiencing on other models but it just never happened.

Mojave? Not compatible with this computer.

So now I'm left with a nearly unusable computer with no chance that the company who broke it will ever fix it.

Even worse, I've lost confidence in Apple. Why would I spend premium dollars to buy a new computer from a company that can't even be relied upon to fix a terrible operating system that broke so many people's systems (over 650 messages in this thread, over 50,000 views).

I bought my first Linux machine to do my dev work in August. I eagerly anticipated the new iPhones but didn't pull the trigger because I'm not sure it's worth it now that it won't function seamlessly with my computer.

I know Apple doesn't care but I do. I'm going to miss working on a Mac and even more, I'm going to miss the pleasure of new Apple products that I've bought so many of in the last 30 years.

In response to my original findings I have now let my mac to sit idle for almost two days. At start WindowServer was using about 200MB memory and today after two days it has grown to almost 1GB.

My freeses on my iMac happened aroud sleep or change of logged in user. It never affected my non Administrator accounts. Not reoccurred since full rein

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