High Sierra freeze

I am sending just confirmation that those temporary/recoverable freezes introduced with High Sierra to my MBP are gone. It seems that they was I/O related. Upgrading of firmware on my 3rd party SSD did the trick.

I had this same problem and tried many things without success. However I applied the most recent update 10.13.4 (17E199) while in safe mode (just happened to see the update while trying that) and the problem has gone away!

Wondering what application you are referring to?

I must mention that the freezing which had stopped for awhile after the 10.13.4 update, recurred as suggested it would by others here. I then contacted Apple support and after a number of troubleshooting measures discussed, was told to inactivate the contents of my ~/library/LaunchAgents folder by selecting all and right clicking "new folder with contents." I did find one Launch Agent from an incompatible software, Printopia v. 2. The developer claims that it should only crash the application under High Sierra but it was installed as a system preference pane and since that LaunchAgent is gone, I've been freeze free for 4 days. I know I should but it back and prove the problem recurs but for now I just like using my computer again. Hoping I don't jinx myself with this post.

Although I was able to tame my 10.13.4, my friends were still having issues.

For me, what happened was a huge improvement.

1. In Safari > Preferences > Search > everything in “Smart Search Field” unclick them all. I can only guess it puts a strain on Macs that aren’t the fastest, latest, greatest.

2. An even greater improvement was the removal of the “DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials Safari Extension”. I’m NOT talking about the basicThe DuckDuckGo search browser in the “Search” > “Search engine” selection. It’s great for its anonymity, lack of ads/clutter.

There is a separate Extension at Safari > Preferences > Extensions called “DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials” Remove it.

See https://youtu.be/bGVM0pm-DRk

Once again, I think it is placing too much of a workload on Safari.

I came to this conclusion from the hint that the “beachball” was only while it was over Safari, not the Finder/Desktop. It gave the appearance Safari was working on something very hard.

In Safari, remove/unclick everything you really don’t need. If it speeds things up, slowly add them to see if you can spot the task(s) hogging all of your Mac’s time. Also, check the Websites > Plug-Ins for anything you don’t use.

I understand that most of us use Safari for nearly everything and if it gets frozen, the Mac can appear frozen, to the point of locking up the rest of the Mac, especially if you start clicking on everything in the Finder, resulting in more “beachballs”. To that, all I can say is let your Mac catch up. Don’t touch anything and see if the “beachballs” start to vanish. Then carefully and slowly remove many of the Safari extensions and Smart Search options.

Personally, I use just the AdBlock Ultimate Extension, keep all of the Smart Searches turned off and use DuckDuckGo as my browser of choice.

In my case it seems to be related to the RAM dropping really low, say 200 MB, and not cleaning up properly, then the MacMini (late 2014 - 4 GB ram) freezes. The only solution for me is to run the app from the App Store 'Memory Clean 2' by FipLab with auto clean enabled, Threshold level set to 400 MB.

I will add my voice to those who found a solution by using OnyX (free utility app at https://www.titanium-software.fr/en/onyx.html). It took about 8 minutes to run the default maintenance tasks and then it rebooted my Mac. I went to the various things that would typically cause my Mac to hang and it has not hung at all. It has worked for me in the short term...hopefully this is also a long-term solution.

UPDATE: Running the maintenance tasks in OnyX works for about one week and then the freezes begin again. So now I run the maintenance tasks once a week. Not the ideal solution, but a solution none the less.

TIP: Uncheck the first two OnyX maintenance tasks ("Verify the structural of the system files" and "Run maintenance scripts") before running. These two tasks take a long time to execute and they don't seem to have an effect on improving the freezing issue.

perhaps installing a "supplemental" update helps (a correction of a graphics bug):

macOS 10.13 Supplemental

globalisReal wrote:

try reset the 'SMC'

improve the issues on my Mac pro a bit..

go away

Disabling TRIM support on my transcend external SSD seems to have stopped the freezes that I had on a daily basis. Running OS 10.13.3 on a late 2014 mac mini.

I upgraded to High Sierra yesterday and everything worked fine (was slow at first, but seems it was because of indexing etc after upgrade.)
Today it started freezing up, while doing some work on my MacPro 2017 that I recently bought. I realized that I got an iCloud error message that kept popping up and that my finder completely stopped responding. After a few hard reboots and a couple of swear words, I eventually got to log out of my icloud and completely shut it down... everything started working smoothly again. I then realized it might be because i switched on my previous mac and realized that was the issue, so after switching off my old macbook, my icloud started working again on my new mac... I don't know if that could be the issue for any of you, but yeah, this caused my mac to completely freeze up. Hope it helps for someone, although I suspect many of you have other issues. Just posting this response here because this was where I ended up, trying to figure out why my mac was freezing. Hope it helps.

True. But alongside macOS updates come firmware updates. These cannot get rolled back, even in a downgrade. So when you downgraded the OS you still kept the High Sierra firmware on your Mac. It could well be that part of what we all are experiencing is rooted in firmware, and its interaction with the OS, and not a pure OS issue. Thus, it may still be manifesting itself in Sierra once you installed High Sierra. That is part of why I’m not going to try any form of downgrading, because at this point I cannot fully downgrade anyway, none of us can, given how firmware works, so will stick it out with High Sierra and await a fix in an update. In the meantime I’ll see, if I have the time to during the next times this issue comes up on my iMac, to try and figure out more about what is going on, at least on my Mac. I develop for iOS as part of my work, so know a whole lot about the internals of macOS as well, and will try and see if I can determine what is actually causing this to send a bug report in to Apple.

@alex349 I've seen same and agree with your assessment of Metel being part of or all of the issue; if it looks like a duck...

One other big change has been the file system of course - maybe it's looking up? I've seen a lot from the spinny-beachball lately.

I've reported Mac Pro version of this at:

Re: Mac Pro (late 2013) randomly freezes after update to High Sierra

But I've seen exactly the same scenario where the screen stops updating except for mouse pointer movement... I wonder if they're still implemented in hardware?

Here's what I reported/found in logs:

The 'display' becomes unresponsive or freezes after some hours of inactivity - it doesn't appear to me during a working day. The machine is still alive as I can remote in via ssh and call for a shutdown - it doesn't end in a power off but does shut down the OS - the trackpad stops clicking and the caps-lock light stops responding. But the screen is left displaying whatever was there at the moment of failure.

If the problem occurs whilst the screen was sleeping, the screen(s) power up but display a black image - basically what was probably last on the frame buffer. I would describe it as a video driver issue where the current frame buffer just stops updating.

Here's what I've tried:

1. Disabled computer from sleeping - no change.
2. Disabled screen power-down - no change other than the freeze occurs with a screen filled with information.

Upon failure, the system log fills with:

Oct 3 21:27:29 Ambroise com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.DumpGPURestart): Service only ran for 0 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 10 seconds.

Oct 3 21:27:34 Ambroise com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.preference.displays.MirrorDisplays): Service only ran for 0 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 10 seconds.

Before finally closing with:

Oct 3 22:20:17 Ambroise com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.DumpGPURestart): Service only ran for 0 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 10 seconds.

Oct 3 22:20:19 Ambroise com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.preference.displays.MirrorDisplays): Service only ran for 0 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 10 seconds.

Oct 3 22:20:24 Ambroise shutdown[7447]: SHUTDOWN_TIME: 1507083624 549748

Incidentally, I'm getting a lot of these all the time:

Oct 3 19:43:43 Ambroise com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.preference.displays.MirrorDisplays): Service only ran for 0 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 10 seconds.

Really looking forwards to a fix.

If all else fails, back up your critical files, wipe your hard drive and do a clean install of Sierra or El Capitan. I did, and as you can see from my other posts in this thread, I do not regret it for one instant. It solves the freezes, and it runs faster since it is a less demanding OS.

Nightprowler83 wrote:

Kallisti, thank you for posting this. Would you have instructions on how to do some of the steps you mentioned?

Specifically, the following:

• turned off automatic graphics switching

• rebuilt LaunchServices

• rebuilt DYLD's shared cache

• rebuilt XPC cache

• rebuilt CoreDuet database

• rebuilt Mac Help

Download Onyx for High Sierra, go to Maintenance tab, then go to the Rebuild tab.

be aware that Onyx has enough functionality to ruin your OS, so use it wisely