High Sierra freeze

so i finally bit the bullet ... i've had my 2012 mbp retina for 5.x years ... decided to do a TRUELY clean install ... i've been wanting to do this for a while but workload prohibited and my daily driver (2017 imac 27" motherboard hit the s-can) ... but with my displays freezing between 5-7 times per day, i had to move forward with my evil plans ... so ... i started my rebuild friday afternoon during work hours (yes, i bill by the hour).

rebooted with command-R ... internet install ... disk utility ... reformatted journalized HFS (non-encrypted) ... installed lion (10.7) ... boy, what a flashback ... as much as i ***** about apples QA/QC, they have come a long way ... from 10.7, you can't go directly to 10.12 or 10.13, you gotta be on 10.8 ... so, 10.8 i went (trying to locate it from the app store was an adventure, but alas, i found it) ... 10.8 it is ... by the way ... NO UI LAG on 10.7 or 10.8 ... and this is all powering their 27" cinema display (2560x1440).

made it to 10.8 ... then on to 10.12(.6) - cant go directly to 10.13.x ... everything updated fine (EXCEPT OF COURSE, APPLES KEYCHAIN DEBOCKLE ... whoever was in charge of that should be hanged, buried, dug up, then re-hung.

so, at 10.12.6 ... no UI lag, no display freezes. just mac OS ... works great. TM backed-up at that point.

i wanted to see how the UI behaves at 10.13.3 ... updated ... sure enough, while the UI lag is less than my original 5 year old constantly upgraded account .... its still not close to the buttery smooth UI of 10.12.6 ... but, haven't had a display freeze in over 48 hours.

added my typical developer software ... parallels, chrome, pdfedit, filezilla, ultraedit/compare, securecrt, dashlane, iheart radio, podcast for overcast, itsycalc, weatherbug, office 2016, snagit, apples FCP, GarageBand, LogicX, etc. including the 100gb of content download ... all other software runs in a vm (visual studio for mac, xcode, github, etc)

END RESULT: while my displays aren't freezing anymore, i'd image 10.13.x's metal2 re-write isn't fully baked (at least not for my 2012 mbp retina). still considering to move back to 10.12 at this point ... i'll wait a couple weeks before making that decision.

Probably just coincidence you open less windows on the machines with less RAM. I've got 32GB RAM and after enough windows have been opened it freezes. I can replicate the freeze by opening many windows, doing full screen youtube, command+tab back to first desktop, then closing the tab (command+w) that says youtube is playing in fullscreen. Screen freezes with the File menu item blue, but can move mouse, can SSH in and system appears to be running normally but can't restart WindowServer and restart command stops system but doesn't reboot. A way to reboot without hard power off is running sysdiagnose with command+control+option+shift+period which is supposed to generate system report but instead reboots. Playing video on other websites like Facebook also causes it, I can predict it about to happen by videos struggling to play, quicklook videos not working, or receiving a video iMessage appears as blank white box.

Like others experiencing this daily freeze I use a 4k external monitor in scaled res.

I've been an Onyx user for several years so I'll go ahead and add that as another user in this long, long thread mentioned, Onyx does seem to clear up the issue quite a bit for at least a few days at a time. It's a bit of a pain to run it every week or so but it definitely helps.

I run the Onyx maintenance scripts pretty much as the default configuration though I do make some changes to which files are cleaned (deleted). If I had to guess, I say it's probably one of the "Rebuilding" tasks that's helping the problem. The problems do creep back in though over time.

Since a recent post mentioned Launch Services, that is one of the things that is rebuilt when the maintenance script is run. I tried the steps that poster mentioned and they didn't help me but re-running Onyx did. There are several other databases that are rebuilt during the script, some of which I'm not familiar with.

I have no association with the product, and make no money from it in any way (it's actually a free utility) and while I won't say it'll solve everyone's problems, it has definitely helped me weather this ridiculous bug that Apple seems to be doing essentially nothing to resolve. It doesn't do anything you can't do some other way but it does pull them into one place which makes it about as convenient as it can be when my system deteriorates.

---

Tim

No it happens with newer Mac book pros with AMD graphic cards. It is universal and related to high Sierra. No update or beta thus far solves the issue.... You all need to report to Apple

Since 10.13.1 did not fix the freezes I had to downgrade back to Sierra.

that solved the freezes for me.

• verified disk
• reset NVRAM
• reset SMC

Only way for me was a downgrade to Sierra. Now it is stable again, not a single freeze or reboot within a week now.

I hope for 10.13.3....

Hi again, have discovered that unplugging my USB back up disks stops the freezing problem. Will reformat one and see if that helps...

I started my MacBook in SafeBoot Thursday night, with among other things, clears out system (and font) cache. Restarted and it hasn't froze since. I still have graphic glitches and the windowserver memory is still high though.

Mark,

There seems to be a specific issue with the Mac Pro, I have the same system spec. but without raid and with different monitors - check your system log for "com.apple.DumpGPURestart" for confirmation and, please report it to Apple, we need as many voices as possible as we're all loosing many working hours restarting and re-doing work. Thanks.

com.apple.DumpGPURestart can be found in system.log. I read it using Console app but it's located in /private/var/log/system.log

You can also look at the old system.log in the console app too under /var/log

That sounds like the same behavior as I'm seeing on my Mac Pro. Can you look at the system log - launch the 'Console' app and look at system log. Around the freeze, see if you can see, or search (top right) for 'com.apple.DumpGPURestart'.

I found it in a stack overflow answer. It says thats resets display preferences, whenever it means... But it's just another desperate attempt ... No freeze since I ran it, but was just a few hours

#!/bin/sh echo "" sudo echo "Reset Display Settings v. 1.0.0" echo "" echo "Deleting global preferences" sudo rm -f /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver.plist sudo rm -f /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver.plist.* sudo rm -f /Library/Preferences/com.displaylink.plist sudo rm -f /Library/Preferences/com.displaylink.plist.* sudo rm -f /Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist sudo rm -f /Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist.* sudo rm -f /private/var/db/.com.apple.iokit.graphics sudo rm -f /private/var/db/.com.apple.iokit.graphics.* echo "" echo "Deleting user preferences" for i in ~root /Users/* do echo $i sudo rm -f $i/Library/Preferences/com.displaylink.USBNivoListener.plist sudo rm -f $i/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.windowserver.*.plist sudo rm -f $i/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.windowserver.*.plist.* sudo rm -f $i/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist sudo rm -f $i/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist.* sudo rm -rf $i/Library/Preferences/Caches done echo "" echo "Resetting NVRAM" sudo nvram -c echo "" echo "Done! Please restart the system"

So this just happened to me again. This time before shutting my Mac down via SSH I first had it gather a sysdiagnose so I could examine the state it gets in when this occurs. When I look at the top.txt file in this sysdiagnose (output of running the top command-line tool), it lists WindowServer as “stuck”. So, this is irrefutable evidence that at least what I’ve been seeing is indeed a problem with WindowServer. When the screen freezes in this way, WindowServer is indeed not functional. Hints further at Metal 2 being the likely culprit... Even without a clear way to reproduce this in a definite set of steps I think that I’ll submit a bug report to Apple, now that I have a sysdiagnose from in the middle of this problem. That, at least, may help them. I sincerely hope that the bug is otherwise marked as a duplicate, and that maybe even in 10.13.1 this gets fixed.

kallisti wrote:

I was experiencing fairly frequent irrecoverable freezes. SSH as root would not trigger a reboot etc.
I have 3 external displays in addition to the one on my 2017MBP (max config)
A lot of ppl are citing the GPU/Metal2 as the culprit and I absolutely agree that seems to be related

Most of the time, the lock-ups occurred while editing in Premiere Pro CC and AfterEffects

However

With High Sierra came a number of other minor bugs that I sought to remedy and I'm not entirely sure, but I may have inadvertently stopped the GPU glitch at the same time. It's been 4 days since the system froze and it ceased coincidentally with the following:

• ran drive repair from recovery (to fix all the damage from the last few panics)

• updated all drivers

• safe booted, logged in to both root account & user account during safe boot (my root login is enabled)

-waited until all drive activity dropped to zero

• reset NVRAM

• turned off automatic graphics switching

• rebuilt LaunchServices

• rebuilt DYLD's shared cache

• rebuilt XPC cache

• rebuilt CoreDuet database

• rebuilt Mac Help

• rebooted twice

it's been 4 days of serious video and audio production/rendering across 4 displays and mysteriously no lockups
I'll report back as soon as one happens again

Well that was short-lived

it freaked out again last night.

Corrupted my backup drive ....that's 14TB I'll never get back