System freezes since High Sierra

I've written about my experiences earlier in this thread. I didn't have crash or freeze from 18 January to 26 January but on 27 January, I had two freezes during the day. Despair. However, the day after, the 10.13.3 update came out which I installed 27 January and have not had a crash since. The release document for 10.13.3 mentions freezes when connected to an SMB server - perhaps a clue(?).

I have had similar problem with my MacBook pro mid 2010. Just spent seven hours gratefully with the genius's in my local AAPL store. Basically whatever I tried after High Sierra upgrade the computer would not get past startup, and hardly anything accessible including safe boot. Even the online repair and replace OS when I managed to connect and download new OS did not work. After several hours trying in the store, the penny finally dropped when I mentioned an error code in SU mode then installer log 'target not convert.me to APFS. This volume is not formatted as mac os extended (journaled)' .

It seems there is a file system inconsistency with High Sierra basically configured for SSD, whereas the older macs may still have the original spinning HDD that AAPL may not yet have recognized, or at least at the time of HS upgrade with the upgrade being offered then to us veterans.

Anyway long and short was able to via back door on the shop system recover to an external HD the files in my computer, then the High Sierra erased and reinstalled with Sierra. Since then all has been vok though of course tedious to restore/reset old files, apps and the rest. But far better than the prior situation of complete stall, and now working well again. Will bide my time before High Sierra retry!

Update on my late 2015 27" iMac which WAS freezing horribly on a regular basis. It occurred to me that maybe the format that all my external HDD's were set up might be an issue. So I reformatted all to the new APFS and guess what, no more freezing not since last week. It was a hassle for sure, backing everything up off each HDD and then reformatting and recopying everything over, but its done the trick for sure. Hope this helps

Hi grzdzn

After a reboot I always had a few minutes to look through the processes in the activity monitor before my system froze. One of the problem was with the backup, at least this is what it seemed to be. The comments related to issue with WD under High Sierra led me to believe that was the issue. At least I got my system to run rather stability when I turned the automatic backup of, so that I could control when it happened.

I continued my search though and stopped various processes after startup to see the effect. At one point I was astonished to see that my Mac was behaving normally again, and when looking at the list of processes got suspicious about my virus scan. I new from past experience that this was the type of process that could cause problems. As I saw your post I quickly checked the backup again, and effectively observe that everything is fine if I deactivate the virus scan! Now I don't quiet understand the root cause of this issue, and surely need to find a virus scan solution to replace the current one, but it now seems to me that the virus scan software I was using was probably not compatible with HighSierra. It is a virus scan provided by my internet provider (UPC Cablecom in Switzerland) and is not one of the more well known internet security providers.

I would be interested to know if anyone else had similar experiences, and what virus scan packages work with High Sierra.

I have this problem on two different Macs (desktop and laptop), so it's not a hardware problem. At first I thought it was my desktop, which is quite old, but it's also happening with my laptop (which is only 2 years old). For the exact same thing to be suddenly happening with two completely different computers, immediately after both were upgraded to the new OS, I think it's most likely a bug in High Sierra. But for some reason it's not impacting everyone, so perhaps it's connected to specific apps. Are you running Dropbox? I noticed that when I reboot after a freeze, Dropbox does not automatically start (even though it's set to start with my computer). This makes me wonder if Dropbox is somehow related to the freeze, and the Mac is preventing it from opening on restart. Or maybe it's something else, but I'm going to try running without Dropbox for a day or two and see what happens.

I have this problem, too, on my Mac Pro (Late 2013): I installed High Sierra (upgraded from Sierra) on October 6th. Ever since then, here is what happens: I leave my Mac running at the end of the work day. I come back to my office the following morning and the computer is unresponsive to trackpad or keyboard wakeup. My only option is to restart the computer.

I have reset SMC. I have downloaded and reinstalled High Sierra as of October 11th. I have upgraded my external monitor card drivers (Blue Diamond) to High Sierra compatible drivers. The system is still locked up on most mornings. The only thing that has changed is that after resetting SMC the monitors actually wake upon response to touching the trackpad or keyboard. But, that doesn't matter, because the actual operating system is locked up.

On October 11th, I opened a ticket with Apple support and have provided their engineers with a crash dump diagnostics file.

This behavior has happened nearly every day since installing High Sierra on October 6th. Although, curiously, the computer was awake and ready for business for me the past two days (October 15th and 16th) without incident...and without a change on my part.

I have just heard back today (October 16, 2017) from my Apple support contact who has confirmed that:

• Computers locking up is a known issue that is affecting many users who have upgraded to High Sierra.
• As such, research will continue and it will be addressed in a forthcoming operating system update.

Technology. It's great...when it works. #ahem

Yeah same for me too .. I found that turning off the screen saver stopped the daily crashing. It seems that when the computer wants to go into any kind of sleep or low power mode High Sierra freezes. I'd suggest turning off screen saver for now.

Although my computer did freeze and crash and reboot today when I was working on it .. but generally operates more stable than with the screen saver on.

I have had this issue since I opened the Mac Pro box and started the system. It appeared to be a conflict of hardware or drivers. After eliminating everything except the Mac Pro itself, I seem to have found a workaround.

From the Terminal run "caffeinate -isa" and leave the window open but out of the way.

I have not had any crashes or freezes since. If this is indeed a solid workaround it indicates the issue has to do with some piece of the system sleeping most likely involving the gnu.

My freezes would most often come when running some video and the screen saver coming on. It has however occurred when doing nothing more than scrolling down a Safari window.

Hope it works for y'all as well as it seems to be for me.

Good news I hope. I discovered a google installed updater was executed just before my system froze.

A search turned up this page:

http://applehelpwriter.com/2014/07/13/how-to-remove-googles-secret-update-softwa re-from-your-mac/

It seems to be working. The last crash which lead to this occurred while I was scrolling in a Safari page. They are calling it "Finder Freeze".

If this actually lasts and indications are it will then next step is send it to GOOGLE.

Good luck

Mine failures were mostly with the screen saver running or videos playing.........but this updater runs independent of all that. This is an automatic secret service which Google makes no mention of installing. If you use Gmal or Youtube or Chrome there is a good chance it is installed and running in the background.

The article outlines how to determine if it is installed and how to turn it off or remove it.

That solved my problem after 'upgrading' to High Sierra, back to Sierra and all well since. Issue appears to be

related to APFS and volume format on older macs. Real hassle though until resolved. Internet repair also did not solve the problem, was done eventually via AAPL shop when the light clicked re an installer log message I had picked up.

I have the exact same problem. Computer has been unresponsive after being in sleep mode. The mouse works but I have a spinning rainbow ball, all apps are either hanging or not responsive and all operations are running painfully slow. The only fix is hard restart and then everything is fine until the next time I wake up the mac. I noticed that when the computer is unresponsive/in slow mode, there was an operation going on--time machine backup. Also, this started over the weekend right after I upgraded to 10.13.3. Prior to that, things were fine. (I was fine on 10.13.2) After having to reboot every single time the iMac wakes from sleep mode, I finally turned off Time Machine, and it hasn't happened since, which is putting a band aid on the problem. Has your problem been solved?

2 things, the 10.13.3 update does seem to help, watch your activity monitor[CPU] for high percent activity. For my mid 2015 IMac only Photos with 30+ meg raw files causes any issues still.... I also have checked the Share Mac Analytics in the system preferences -Security and Privacy-Privacy to be sure Apple is aware of the issues with Sierra/High Sierra.

I installed the 10.13.3. update on 28 January and haven't had a freeze since. The only residual issue that started after upgrading to High Sierra is that TweetDeck crashes a lot - seems to be when I open a new tab in Safari. So I'm hoping the High Sierra nightmare is largely over.

High Sierra 10.13.3 also solved the issue on my side. My MacPro 2013 was freezing every day with 10.13.1 and 10.13.2. Since 10.13.3, it have been working perfectly for several weeks.