High Sierra freeze

For those of you going to extreme lengths and trying dozens of complex tasks to fix the freezing issue (or crossing your fingers and praying that Apple patches it sometime in the immediate future), I want to reiterate that there is a perfectly decent workaround solution that will have you up and running perfectly in a short amount of time with no freezes:

1) evacuate your critical files to external storage,

2) wipe your internal drive with disk utility in recovery mode, and

3) do a clean install of an older version of macOS using a bootable USB drive or other storage media as documented here: Create a bootable installer for macOS - Apple Support.

Unless you are an Apple engineer being paid to come up with an answer to why the freezes are occurring, or you just really enjoying troubleshooting and problem-solving complex processes, I can't really see why anyone wouldn't just take the easy route. This worked for me, and I am willing to bet it will work for most other people experiencing this issue.

Gigazaga, I have the exact same P2715Q on my MacPro, along with 2 TB monitors. Ever since I stopped allowing my computer to go to sleep or go into screen saver mode, I haven't had a freeze since (10+ days and counting). For a while I thought the slower wake up speed of the Dell monitor was causing the trouble, but I have had a freeze even when I don't use it and only use my 2 Apple monitors, so I'm optimistic that it is not the Dell monitor per se that is the trouble. (I'm not sure I've had a freeze when only using one monitor, but haven't tried lately.)

I also have a late 2012 MBP Retina. And I had a Dell 4K Monitor connected. Had freezes at least 2 times a day. Since I switched to an older non 4K Monitor I had no freezes at all. I also disabled automatic time machine backups.

spk0 wrote:

There is easy way to replicate the freeze.

1. have a mac with high sierra

2. attach 4K display

3. set display mode to "scaled" instead of "Default for display" and select "More Space"

4. open many windows

5. start moving them around. between displays, and within displays.

6. see ui freeze quite fast.

It is possible to replicate this without 4K external display, but it takes much longer then to replicate

This is what I reported Apple via bugreport and they acknowledged that it's known issue.

7. you can close the lid (keep the 4k display attached), wait a few hours (like overnight), and when you open wake up the mac, WindowServer will be eating you cpu and slowing down everything, so you need to force a shutdown or restart.

fiber0pti wrote:

I'm on the latest beta. Froze 1 minute after installing and started using the computer. What seems to work so far is the Onyx maintenance tool. Hasn't froze once since I ran it.

the Onyx routine stopped mine from randomly freezing, however there is one Adobe Premiere Pro transition that'll lock the machine up every time

I have a MBP 2012 Edition with a Dell 27" 4K monitor attached via thunderbolt. I was experiencing about one freeze a day after installing High Sierra. Last Friday I signed up for the Public Beta and installed macOS 10.13.1 Beta and the freezes stopped. I do not know if this will work for everybody, but it works for me. It's great to be able to get work done without an freeze problems. I must have lost 2 to 3 days worth of work because of this issue.

Thanks,

Art.

Another day without the freeze after removing the drivers for AirDisplay's driver. I'm not saying that this is the only cause, but in my circumstances it has resulted in a system that is more stable.

From an outsiders opinion (I don't work for Apple), but having 20 years experience debugging operating systems and software, It seems like the freeze that everyone is experiencing is a poorly handled Kernel Panic. I think that the many routes to this issue would normally result in a message on the screen to restart the computer but it seems to never gets to that message, it just gets stuck before that.

I would advise that everyone go to their System Preferences, Security & Privacy. Got to the bottom to Analytics and click the lock to unlock and enable Share Mac Analytics if you haven't already done that. At least when the machine is restarted, the information about the freeze and restart should be sent to Apple for them to analyse.

Kallisti's recommendations are a few pages back this thread. Basically what I did was to clear the NVRAM (booting with control-command-P-R) and using Onyx to perform a few house cleaning procedures that he mentioned.

marsman250 wrote:

The 'High Sierra Freeze' issue appears 2-3 times daily for me on my 15" MacBook Pro 11,3. I am connected to two 27" external monitors via Thunderbolt. A coworker experiences the same issue while her 13" MacBook is connected to an external monitor. The freeze doesn't seem to be App specific and is a real productivity killer!

TEMPORARY FIX:

During the freeze, I disconnect the Thunderbolt cables and open the MacBook. The resulting graphics screen refresh seems to cure it and I reattach the monitors. The fix only lasts for a while, then I have to repeat the process. Graphics/graphics card issue? Time will tell.

interesting

I am now on 10.13.1 - minutes after release i installed it, and have no crash since then. Before a 3 or 4 crashes a working day. Can be productive again!

And WindowServer is no more memory eating machine. And kernel task is also no memory eating machine.

Seems that the issue is resolved for me (mbp mid 2012 retina).

Looking forward.

After installing the driver from NVidia, my problem has been completely solved.

It is wired because in the description, NVidia never say that the driver will work with 750M, but it worked anyway.

So the problem must have things to do with default discrete graphics driver.

As mentioned folks, leave high Sierra well alone until they've worked it out. It freezes up most laptops / Macs and distorts the graphics/display. The stress and time of it all isn't worth it. I had to revert back to the standard Sierra and it was TRICKY because the screen was barely visible due to distortion static and all sorts ha! Try making a boot disk and back up of all files with barely any screen to look at. Luckily doing that fixed any freezing and display distortion. ( because I reverted back to an older OS ). It might not work for everyone, but did here pour moi.

Update : I think the freezing fixed. First of all, I did what you did but it still freezes anyway. But after startup with safe mode and reboot, I ran the diagnostic(just press D during startup), it shows no problem like I posted before but after that, it does not freeze anymore. Maybe the diagnostic can also fix things. It can even run gpu benchmark. Also Autodesk Alias needed update so I did that and it does not freeze anymore either. I hope it lasts.

I have all of the same freezing issues with my Mac Pro including the "won't wake from sleep" problem. After a few chats with support that resulted in no fixes, their conclusion was that it must be a hardware issue. This will be my last Apple purchase as the only viable solution has been to make my workstation useless by running it with a single display. Eliminating the secondary display eliminated about 95% of my freezing issues including the "wake form sleep" problem and now I only experience freezes during some GPU intensive operations. If it is a "hardware problem" the recommended update to High Sierra caused it.

Back again.

My HS freezing issues are maybe gone now. It seemed to be caused by my USB disks, which worked perfectly pre-HS.

I erased/reformatted 2 of my back up USB disks. One them could not be erased on this machine, so I reformatted using an old iMac running Tiger, then one more time on this machine. No freezes in High Sierra anymore when these disks are plugged in and when back ups are being made.

Driver issues maybe?