High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

Personally I have a Macbook Pro with SSD and all I did was boot into recovery with cmd+R and then choose to recover from my Time Machine backup. It just worked. Seemed to take care of everything I never had to reformat back to HFS+.

I have this issue every now and then, I think is heat related and the CPU is being throttled, I replaced the thermal paste in the CPU and GPU and it went smooth, but now it is happening again. I'll keep an eye on this thread.

I originally replied to this thread back in early October, right after my initial "upgrade" to High Sierra (done at the behest of Apple Support in order to "fix" another problem I was having with iCloud on my iPhone). As a result of the installation of High Sierra, I was getting lots of freezing on my iMac requiring rebooting. After figuring out that the freezing might be related to a video issue, and ceasing usage of the QuickTime player application (as well as no longer leaving webpages open to YouTube videos), the instances of outright freezing diminished significantly. Now, it only happens once every few days.

However, I've been observing that I'm still getting short lags in the video updating when moving windows around the screen, or scrolling through documents. These lags appear to be somewhere in the few-hundred millisecond range ... long enough to observe, and create choppy window movement, but apparently short enough to not generally result in a full-on freeze up of the system. It is highly repeatable, and happens any time a window is moved, or scrolled. It also seems to affect text entry, and other functions requiring UI updates. I'm not sure that this is simply a video problem, or if it is something else going on at the system level that is robbing the UI of enough CPU cycles to be able to update for short periods of time (less than a second, but enough to observe UI "stuttering". I'm seeing it occasionally lag (while typing characters) even now while typing this into the Reply box on this webpage (in Safari). I can move the mouse part way across the screen and have it "jump" several inches, rather than follow drag motion.

I've tried a different mouse, just be make sure I wasn't losing mouse updates. No difference, even with a different mouse.

Its certainly better than outright freezing requiring reboots, but still pretty very annoying that High Sierra has degraded the performance of what used to be a fine machine.

I've installed every update since the original update to High Sierra, but none seem to have yet cured the problem. Still waiting for an update that actually fixes this...

This is what worked in case you didn't see my comment to warp23's post:

warp23Dec 30, 2017 12:02 PM in response to sckeedoo

Level 1 (4 points)

Mac OS X

Dec 30, 2017 12:02 PM Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stopsin response to sckeedoo

Just to confirm, my MacBook Pro 2014 with NVidia GPU problem is COMPLETELY FIXED. Haven't had a freeze in a few weeks now.

The NVidia Web driver did the trick. Thanks guys.

Hi Troy,

I didn't actually go backwards from High Sierra to Sierra but alternately as the 2010 Mac Pro 5,1 has 4 drive bays I was able to clone a couple of separate 1 TB SSD flash drives with my complete data and system for safe keeping while I fought the battle with High Sierra. I could have gone back to Sierra without losing data but I chose not to as I had the 2015 Macbook Pro loaded with Sierra anyway and luckily I kept it far away from High Sierra.

As I said in an earlier post it was not by design but by accident while changing boot drives back and forth on the Mac Pro I discovered some SSD drives run High Sierra very well at blazing speeds and some earlier flash drives even if not the boot drive will slow High Sierra to a crawl as most posting here are experiencing. Any external or internal drive that is not the boot drive in an Apple Mac system will be polled by the boot system every few seconds.

Here's what I'm finding out in the last few days. When loading the High Sierra APFS file system, the arrangement it uses copies and reformats the "metadata" but does not erase the old "metadata".. Many believe the result is High Sierra gets confused and lost..

That's only part of the problem, of course the firmware in the flash drives has to be compatible with APFS to operate correctly and most early SSD drives like we have in our earlier Macbook Pros are not. The new Macbook Pros are just fine because Apple now knows how to build drives to run correctly with High Sierra.

IMHO Apple should provide equipment at the Apple stores so people with only one drive in their CPU can come in and have that data transferred to a new APFS compatible flash drive at a bargain price with the High Sierra system loaded correctly.

Hello Karen,

Your "non-techie lingo" is as good as mine. Although I've been using Apple products for almost 30 years I've come to the point of realizing that at rate of advance we are experiencing most tech knowledge becomes invalidated. If Apple doesn't have techs that could foresee a problem as huge as this it seems we are in trouble as a whole.

I believe we both have the same drives in our Macbook Pro's. IMO, the only fix would be to clone data to a APFS compatible external flash drive and replace your internal for now with a late model Crucial flash drive or one that's guaranteed to work well with APFS and reload the internal again with your data.

I can say after a couple weeks with APFS compatible flash drives in my 7 year old Mac Pro desktop the speed and lack of any error is incredible using High Sierra. Zero errors or crashes in two weeks. Internal pages change before your eyes can blink, outdated 4 or 5 year old apps like Spell Catcher ™ run as they were designed to do. It's hard to believe until you actually try it..

While online I'm actually getting error notices from external servers randomly about too much speed when changing pages??

IMO, with the huge liability of this mess it's difficult to get anyone to comment, especially Apple employees. All we hear is a "fix" is coming.. The "fix" will surly be connected to flash drive modification I'm positive of that.. --Paul

First of all, if anyone is reading this that hasn't yet been forced into installing High Sierra by the App Store auto updater located in the preferences area then go to preferences and uncheck all the options in the auto app store updater. That will insure you don't get entangled into High Sierra without the MANDATORY proper flash (SSD) drive installed BEFORE you install High Sierra..

Outside of a video driver boondoggle earlier in HS I'm finding the entire problem with High Sierra is located in the various flash drive architecture of most SSD's.

Of course Apple isn't going to advertise this due to the huge liability they are facing.. But rather whisper; "a fix is in" "a fix is in" "a fix is in"

Again, from an earlier post, For macOS, High Sierra automatically converts the system drive to APFS as part of the installation process. The process does not move your file data. It does copy and reformat file system metadata, but does not erase the old metadata until the rewritten metadata has checked out. The metadata provides information about other data and I believe this is where the problem is. The system gets lost trying to locate various caches of data and gets caught in an ENDLESS loop.. Freezes, crashes and slow response, slow typing as well. Although real time audio is not affected...

Cloning your data and re-installing that data onto a new compatible (SSD) flash drive seems to be the answer in my case. And with the four place hot swappable drive bay in the earlier Mac Pro 5,1 I can recreate the High Sierra problem at any time and correct it by going back to compatible APFS drives. Just adding a non compatible SSD into the chain will take a perfectly good High Sierra system back to errors, freezes and crashes just as I had before. The reason for that is that each drive in the chain is polled constantly by the boot system and the boot system goes into an endless loop trying to find it's way out of any non compatible SSD.

On the other side IMO, when High Sierra is getting along with the correct APFS SSD drives it's the best system Apple has ever produced....

--Paul

One more to add to this loooong thread 🙂 maybe at some point Apple will let us know there have a fix!

I have a mac mini late 2014 with a 256GB pci-e SSD and a second Samsung Evo 850 SSD, running 10.13.3

I migrated from El Capitan to High Sierra (skipped Sierra because I waited a long time before migrating)

Since then I had a LOT of freezes ... and I always had to hard reboot the Mini ....

I formatted both SSD's, then installed Sierra from scratch and I have no issues at all, I'm back on HFS+ of course.

Waiting for a fix to migrate to High Sierra again ...

Of course I tried a LOT of things ....

- Reset SMC/NVRAM

- Migrate Both SSD's to APFS (the Samsung was in HFS+ after the Upgrade

- Forced TRIM on both disks ...

- Removed all un-necessary applications

- Same for all USB devices ...

- Completely disabled Spotlight

- Applied the SMB fix (I am using a SMB share)

- Etc ....

I think it's worth noting that there are two major issues that are being reported:

1. Temporary freezes that only last a few seconds
2. Permanent freezes that require a power down

On my 2013 Mac Pro, I was only experiencing the latter. I have been running 10.13.4 since beta 5, and since then, I have not encountered any freezes for the past two or three weeks *fingers-crossed*.

Hello:

I've been looking at this for quite a while, and here are my few thoughts:

• Those with display freezes/reboots on the Early 2013 Mac Pro should consider whether they have faulty graphics cards - there's a lot of it about. See this thread for pages and pages of discussion: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/mac-pro-late-2013-gpu-driver-issues.1860297
• I have the display stalling on my 2015 MacBook Pro. Never happened with 10.10/10.11/10.12 - only happened after I had upgraded to 10.13.
• Each new release of 10.13 seems to reduce the problem a little - but it still happens. I can almost 100% count on it happening when I wake my machine up, or press an iTunes keyboard button (which brings up a HUD overlay). As long as I leave it a minute or two, the system generally then carries on as normal.
• I see a lot of WindowServer CPU usage. Admittedly, I have a LOT of windows open - but many of them are minimised or hiding behind other windows - which I thought should allow them to nap, and not take up significant resources.
• I had high WindowServer CPU usage on 10.12 too - but I thought one of the big benefits of 10.13 was that WindowServer was moved onto Metal - so I would expect the CPU usage to be lower than in previous versions. Definitely doesn't reliably seem to be that way.
• I have my MacBook Pro display scaled one notch towards 'More Space' in System Preferences>Displays - I wonder if this is a factor that Apple aren't testing towards?
• I also usually run with an external (non-Retina) display attached. Today (under 10.13.6) that seemed to cause my kernel_task process to run with ~400% CPU usage - unplugging the display reduced it back to ~10% again. However, I definitely get the display stalling even without the external display attached.

All in all, I strongly suspect this issue is due to a bad rewrite of WindowServer to move it onto Metal. I've tried multiple reinstalls of the OS over the top of my current install to resolve, and removed as many background launchers as I can do without - but nothing has helped consistently. Unfortunately I've got to use my machine as my day-to-day workhorse, so I cannot nuke it from orbit and start again from scratch. As the problem has lessened over time, it's become less compelling to try major surgery - especially as no-one else seems to have reported consistent success yet.

Something is still badly wrong here. :-(

So far for me no freeze or slow down. So looks like NVRAM and SMC reset did the job. Fingers crossed.

Have you tried Reboot?

Then if still nothing, a reset on PRAM

Option+Command+P+R

when you reboot this time; hold those keys all at once and I would go three chimes, although one is suppose to do it.

Just to confirm, my MacBook Pro 2014 with NVidia GPU problem is COMPLETELY FIXED. Haven't had a freeze in a few weeks now.

The NVidia Web driver did the trick. Thanks guys.

I had this problem the very night that I upgraded. I completely re-imaged my SSD w/ APFS and installed from USB. I had a feeling that this upgrade was going to be less than smooth. That said, this is my first and only problem that I've ever had upgrading macOS in fifteen years.

I've been doing the CTRL+COMMAND+Power instant reboot. Will be trying the CTRL+COMMAND+OPTION+Power shutdown next time instead. I figure that if I hit enter enough times I should be able to do a headless shutdown.

I had major problem with High Sierra on my work iMac (27" Late 2013). Daily freezes (but the mouse continued to move) forced hard restarts. After a week of that, and getting extremely annoyed, I erased the hard drive and installed Sierra. Not a single problem since. Wasted many hours trying to troubleshoot this problem. It seems that Metal 2 may not be fully baked yet.

It should also be noted that I've had ZERO problems with High Sierra on my MacBook Pro.