High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

Today I unplugged my Wacom tablet from MBP and spent a day without major freeze. Let’s see how that goes.

High Sierra 10.13.1 that came out yesterday seems have fixed this problem. At least, it has for me. Be sure to update.

Hi,

I first tried an installation on top of the existing one, that did not help. A fresh installation on a formatted drive fixed it for me.

I did.

Tried a fresh install... complete wipe/format everything, but I did not do a restore from TimeMachine. I wanted to make sure that there was nothing old/cruddy brought over.

Didn't matter. I did the reformat a week and half ago, and it's crashed 8 times on me since then.

Even had it in for service to the apple store for a few days and they concluded that there was nothing wrong with it (hardware-wise). He did say that it *could* be a peripheral I have hooked up to it that I'm using (aka a 3rd party mouse like my Logitech), or some other app that I run that's just causing issues with 10.13. We talked it over and my options were basically:

• Wait for an update from apple to fix... whatever it is that's causing the conflict (hopefully)
• unplug one-by-one my devices each time it happens and use it without them until it (again, hopefully) doesn't happen again
• look for and/or update any drivers that external devices may be using
• or... wipe, and reinstall/downgrade to 10.12.

I've already lost waaay to much time with the reformat and setting everything back up "clean", so doing it again isn't in the cards.

..... yet.

Update... I made a couple of changes since my original posting a couple of weeks ago. I stopped using the Quicktime movie player. I replaced it with the Elmedia video player, which I'm only using on rare occasions. (The specific need to view a lot of video clips has gone away, so I'm not using Elmedia very much, either). The second change is that I no longer leave web pages open that have video players in them.

I'm still using Safari ... I just don't leave browser windows open to Youtube videos, or other web pages hosting video. This has reduced the number of freezes (from multiple instances a day down to once every few days). Oh... I also uninstalled the Drive Genius (from Prosoft Engineering), as it was reporting what I believe to have been erroneous disk problems due to known incompatibilities with High Sierra. For the record, I don't think Drive Genius has anything to do with the freeze problem.

Otherwise, I did not re-image my drive, or re-install anything. I think this is something related to video (and not necessarily hardware related). Maybe Quicktime and/or Metal libraries?

Hi all, so far after installing 10.13.1 udpate I've been able to work a complete day without any crash. This is on a Early 2013 MacBook Pro 15". No external monitors. 1 TB custom SSD drive, 8GB Ram. I will keep testing and report back if I find any crashes.

warp23 wrote:

I believe I have a SOLUTION.

From what I saw this bug is mostly concerning devices with NVidia GPUs. Which I also have, I have a mid 2014 Macbook Pro.

I had the same symptoms, laggy behaviour, in seconds freeze of UI and then even mouse freeze. Hard reboot and in 2-3 hours another incident. It mostly happened with Chrome being opened.

What I was able to find out was that WindowServer process was eating a lot of CPU. So I googled into it and found this:

GO TO System Preferences > Accessibility > Display

Uncheck Reduce Transparency

When I did this, Chrome immediately crashed. Haven't had a freeze since then and it's 20hours+. I wanted to wait longer to be more sure, but I feel your pain and frustration, so I'm posting now. If the freezing returns, I will post again, but in the meantime give it a try.

You should not even see the difference in the UI. What it does is that it removes all transparency from all windows in the UI. Maybe there is some problem with drawing one app over the other with the Metal 2 on NVidia, I dunno.

Hope it works for you guys 😉

Thanks, but as was previously established earlier in this thread, the problems are appearing for people with all GPUs, including AMD Radeon, which I have, as well as for those with only Intel's onboard GPU. The setting your recommend unchecking, Reduce Transparency, at System Preferences->Accessibility->Display, was already unchecked for me. I went ahead and checked it, to see if that makes a difference.

I don't think these are different problems, because what you call problem 1 also sometimes fixes itself. I had some freezes, that solved itself after 100-120 seconds; while most of them don't. I also had some freezes, that could be fixed by removing the cable from an external monitor OR by changing from closed-shell to open-shell. What you call problem 2 is, at least for me, almost always fixable by opening my MacBook from its closed-shell – and can, if not un-triggered like that, often go much longer than 10seconds. Before I tried the closed-shell thing, I had mouse not-really-but-almost-freezing and all the other symptoms for over 2 minutes.

I can list a problem 3 in here, by the way. It is not that big and therefore might be ignored by users also affected – so please check: If I have 2 external monitors connected and I open and close my MacBook carefully (so I know that it is not the ports), then one of the monitors almost always shows a pink screen or some sort of white noise.

I am also experiencing this problem (since upgrading to 10.13.1), it is a MAJOR productivity suck. I am unable to completely eliminate it, but here is a list of things that seem to make it much less terrible:

1. Don't use Chrome or Safari or Opera, use Firefox (and a quantum/nightly build if you can).
2. Keep video viewing to a minimum, this definitely seems related.

Using the two suggestions above has reduced my number of crashes/freezes/reboots from about 10 per day to about 1 or less.

Other items that MAY be related (but I can't yet say for sure) are using an external monitor and/or running in clamshell mode. Following the suggestions elsewhere in this thread to turn off automatic graphics switching has had exactly zero effect on the problem for me (I am running a 16GB RAM late 2013 Macbook Pro Retina with 1TB SSD btw). Hope this info helps someone else and that apple pays some attention to this thread and the bug reporter, this is a VERY serious issue.

Hi Bodhi_Dave,

Did a clean wipe and full reinstall on my mid-2014 MBP 15" with Nvidia GT 750M before 10.13.1 was available because it was just barely usable, I couldn't afford to take the risk to have it freeze on me while doing a presentation with a client. it was crashing too often. I also had weird partitionning since I had to let go of my bootcamp partition.

It went better as I only experienced freezes after waking it from sleep and reconnecting to my 4k screen after lunch break or long meetings without using it.

I updated to the .1 update, and still have those freezes.

Once it froze just as I started the Photo App.

I followed warp23's advice and checked reduced transparency. Now I have less freezes.

Also, having a 1080p external display at home and not a 4k like I have at the office, I can tell that the more strain there is on the graphics card, the sooner the freezes will occur.

I used to have daily freezes at the office before I reduced transparency and maybe once every 2 days at home.

I am really p****ed to hear warp23 recount of his talk with Apple support saying that there is no Global problem.

I did reset NVRAM and SMC just in case but come on...

Going through a full reinstall right now just means so much work and almost pain setting everything all up again just a month or so after I had to do it. And furthermore, without any warranty that it'll fix it !

I need to work not spend valuable work or family time fixing my darn high end (at least when purchased) pricey Mac computer's OS.

Sorry for the ranting, had to let it out.

Good luck to all.

Ssuess,

I thought the same, maybe it is something about pre-installed. Anyway I got the chance to fix the issue after upgrading to 10.13.1 (without cleanup). But just to add some data, I almost never use the computer with an external monitor. During the freeze times I've never had an external monitor connected.

My standard apps: VMWareFusion, all Adobe package, Android Studio, Xcode, Chrome, DropBox, Deezer. All of them are almost open all the time but the freezes happened even using the notepad.

I hope this helps.

Thanks,
Santiago

Good luck to all... I hope this fixes the problem for you. However there seems to be a greater underlying problem with the freezes and crashes. Several of us on this thread have Mac Pro 2013 models which do not have NVIDIA cards.. but rather AMD. I have tried new drivers, and all methods listed in my post just before this one... my only final solution was a complete wipe, and complete reinstall with 10.13.1. Fixed every issue I was having.

Make sure it is not indexing - if it is then just wait until finished.

Next thing I would try would be to LOG OUT of your iCloud accounts, face time etc - every place, wait a few seconds. Then log back in.

If that works for awhile, and comes back, I'd reboot then log back in to those accounts.

paultahoe wrote:

Many of us are also experiencing these exact symptoms on our Mac Pros so I have to believe it's wide spread.

My apologies, I forgot to include the Mac Pro folks. My point is that there have been few, if any, reports of people experiencing the issues outlined in the OP who are running Mac minis, MacBook Airs or MacBooks. That's not to say the issue(s) aren't widespread - they definitely are.

After applying the 10.13.2 Combo Update a few days ago, I've still not had any pausing or freezing.

Hi Sckeedoo,

Just managed to resolve identical issues, it took me a couple of days to understand from where it was coming and to get around it...

First question, which system are you running:

macOS High Sierra 10.13.1

or

macOS High Sierra 10.13.2?

Well in any case the solution would be to install the update 10.13.3 beta, it act almost as a patch and I have resolved all the issues I had before on High Sierra!

Let me know if helpful and if you need to steps to install 10.13.3 beta as you won't find it on App Store nor on Combo updates!

Thanks...