High Sierra freeze

I have the very same problem with my mid2014 macbook pro. High Sierra UI freezes many times in a day. While the freeze occurs the system works still fine underneath. I can ssh to it and check things. Just that only way to recover from the freeze is power off by holding the power button. Even reboot fails.

Seems that disconnecting my external DP display narrows the freezes down to about 1/day while with external display attached the system freezes 6-7 times/day

I guess I need to reinstall this with sierra now and avoid high sierra completely.

I experience this exact issue with the same problems with the external display attached or using the built-in display. Same experience if I only use the laptop display or unplug the external display when the freeze occurs. Glad I'm not the only one.

So I tried doing a system restore to a Time Machine backup of macOS Sierra that I had, but the problem persisted. Normally that would suggest to me that the OS was not the cause, but as another commenter on here pointed out, the firmware updates that accompanied High Sierra may not have been undone by my system restore.

So I am now going to try wiping my hard drive entirely and doing a clean install of Sierra, in the hope that that may resolve the issue. Will report back once my reinstallation is complete.

I think I found where the issue is. WindowServer on High Sierra seems to leak memory quite fast when Scaled resolutions are used. This is with both internal retina display and external display. Specially with 4K displays. With internal retina and scaled resolution the memory leak seems to be quite moderate and you probably get only one freeze per day. But with attached 4K display WindowServer seems to leak memory as fast as 0.2GB/10min and grows beyond some limit quite fast.

Setting all display resolutions to "default" solves the problem. I guess nobody at Apple QA runs scaled displays.

Spk—interesting findings, but they do not apply in my case as I am running a 2012 iMac 21.5” with a 1920x1080 display at default resolution.

I just finished wiping my hard drive and I’m in the process of installing the older OS now. Will report back with more updates later.

same thing is happening to me. macbook pro never froze - EVER - before upgrading to high sierra.

apple really needs to fix this, this is like windows prob and blue screen of death status. how can they do this?

they remove all the ports from their hardware and then make buggy OS's now? what the h@ll apple? you're better than this.

Just to add to the chorus, I have been having freezing problems starting immediately after the High Sierra update, between 1 and 3 times a day. I have a (cylinder) MacPro 2013 w/ D700 GPUs that hooks up to two Apple Thunderbolt monitors and a Dell 4k monitor. Never had a freeze before the update. I've tried all permutations of monitor connections, and at some point every config freezes. The most common scenario for me is trying to wake up from sleep or from a screen saver, but it sometimes will freeze just doing nothing in particular.

I have noticed that I often see a burst of errors in the logs just before I have to force restart the machine that read, "com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.DumpGPURestart): Service only ran for 0 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 10 seconds". Haven't established if it always happens though. Perhaps others can check for suspicious items that are in the logs for just before a freeze.

Opened a BUG to Apple. This is easily reproducible.

Have a Mac with external display, set then to scaled resolution (More Space) then open some windows and start moving them around. Inside one display or from display to another and watch WindowServer memory footprint to grow fast. After reboot WindowServer uses about 200MB memory but after moving windows around it's now using 2GB of memory. Eventually after a while WindowServer freezes and is not recoverable or killable.

Same. Suddenly everything freezes, fan goes to max speed and a reboot is the only thing that will sort it out. Haven't been able to pin down the cause. Thought it might have been Safari, but switched to Opera and problem still remains. So many bugs with this OS, (preview is a disaster!) I'm gutted I 'upgraged'.

"minor update" LOL!

I have a MacBook Pro retina 2012. After updating to High Sierra with a clean install, my Mac freezes up to ten times in a normal working day.

Things I discovered:

- disabling Siri and spotlight make things better, but in spotlight you need blacklist almost every huge folder, because it keeps poping up and eating your cpu.

- window server is very unstable too. A lot of times everything becomes slow and is when window server process is running like a crazy deamon

- using external monitor (and I need one because cervical problems), make things worst

I strongly recommend each of you start your own topic and include the results of an Etrecheck report. This way responders will not have to cull thru so many responses to see who is reporting what. Also give your system version, version of any software that is giving you problems and any other info you feel would be helpful in diagnosing the problem.

Am experiencing similar issues on a 2015 iMac... Since updated to High Sierra, I get regular screen freezing when minimising windows or moving/switching/closing apps. The mouse cursor still moves on the screen but nothing else can be done for about 10 seconds... occasionally, the screen remains frozen and a hard restart needs to be made. Prior to updating from Sierra, everything was running perfectly. Hopefully a fix comes soon!

This is a followup on my previous posts, in which I said I would be wiping my hard drive entirely on my 2012 21.5" iMac and doing a clean install of an earlier version of macOS to see if that would solve the freezing issue for me. Well, it's been 36 hours now of normal computer usage on El Capitan, and I have yet to experience a freeze.

What's more is that not only have the freezes stopped, but I've also noticed a dramatic improvement in performance overall. Starcraft 2 now plays at much higher frame rates at higher levels of detail than I had been getting on High Sierra, and little delays that I'd been experiencing in High Sierra (eg waiting for the "About this Mac --> Storage" tab to populate with my hard drive disk usage) are now completely gone.

While this is not a real "fix" in the sense that the original problem has not been identified and addressed, it for me has been a great workaround. I don't want to just sit around with my fingers crossed hoping Apple patches the new software. I want to have a computer that works properly and performs well, and this has achieved that for me.

Important to note, however: simply downgrading the OS using a Time Machine backup was NOT sufficient for me to address the issue, likely due to the fact that as a previous commenter mentioned, certain elements of the firmware don't get reverted by doing a Time Machine restore.. Only manually saving my files on an external drive and wiping the internal drive entirely, followed by doing a clean install from a USB installer of El Capitan, was sufficient for me to achieve these results.

I hope that Apple does fix whatever appears to be plaguing High Sierra for many of us. But even if they do, I intend to stick with El Capitan on my 2012 iMac, for the performance improvements alone. It's awesome.

After my upgrade iCloud locked up with the 2 factor authentication also. Then after turning on my imac for the second time it got to the end of the progress bar and just stopped, froze.

Apple care then got me to to hold the "command" and "R" buttons down when powering up, then went into system settings, disk utilities, main hard drive then first aid option, let it do its stuff. Has been okay since.

That fixed the imac.

The icloud bit was lucky I had a third device still logged in and managed to get around the authentication with the other iPhone and iMac both not being able to log into icloud without one being logged in first.

christopherxenyo wrote:

This is a followup on my previous posts, in which I said I would be wiping my hard drive entirely on my 2012 21.5" iMac and doing a clean install of an earlier version of macOS to see if that would solve the freezing issue for me. Well, it's been 36 hours now of normal computer usage on El Capitan, and I have yet to experience a freeze.

What's more is that not only have the freezes stopped, but I've also noticed a dramatic improvement in performance overall. Starcraft 2 now plays at much higher frame rates at higher levels of detail than I had been getting on High Sierra, and little delays that I'd been experiencing in High Sierra (eg waiting for the "About this Mac --> Storage" tab to populate with my hard drive disk usage) are now completely gone.

While this is not a real "fix" in the sense that the original problem has not been identified and addressed, it for me has been a great workaround. I don't want to just sit around with my fingers crossed hoping Apple patches the new software. I want to have a computer that works properly and performs well, and this has achieved that for me.

Important to note, however: simply downgrading the OS using a Time Machine backup was NOT sufficient for me to address the issue, likely due to the fact that as a previous commenter mentioned, certain elements of the firmware don't get reverted by doing a Time Machine restore.. Only manually saving my files on an external drive and wiping the internal drive entirely, followed by doing a clean install from a USB installer of El Capitan, was sufficient for me to achieve these results.

I hope that Apple does fix whatever appears to be plaguing High Sierra for many of us. But even if they do, I intend to stick with El Capitan on my 2012 iMac, for the performance improvements alone. It's awesome.

This sounds like the EFI problem being reported by Ars Technica

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/09/an-alarming-number-of-mac s-remain-vulnerable-to-stealthy-firmware-hacks/?comments=1&vs=b