High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

I posted earlier, for reference i have a MacBook late 2013 retina 13 inch, only intel iris no nvidia. As stated previously this issue was around during the beta.With High sierra I had tried everything including clean installs via usb installer. Whenever I went back to sierra all was well again.

Today, after a time machine backup I formatted the drive back to hfs and did a internet recovery back to the stock os (mavericks) i then did a full download of high sierra and did an upgrade but used a terminal command to bypass the conversion to the apfs file system. I have been running now for approx 14hours and have not had any crashes. before i was having a crash probably every hour so this is a massive improvement 🙂

I am obviously missing out of the performance increases from using apfs (which I have never noticed) but at least i now appear to have a stable system and photos is working as intended with my iOS 11 devices

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 😉

I finally had to cave in and do a complete reinstall. I have a Mac Pro 2013, and same issue as others here. However, mine was becoming so erratic and bothersome that I could step away from my system for 10 minutes and come back to find it completely unresponsive, locked up and fans blowing. Checked logs and no crashes, nor errors. Was always unable to check any activities claiming too many system resources since it was always locked up. Did a reset of the NVRAM/PRAM, etc. as recommended and problem seemed to slow, but always returned within a week. I swapped out RAM to that of a known system that was working... nope, still crashing. Unplugged all displays except for the primary, and no luck. Unplugged all drives and peripherals, and still no luck. I even went so far as to slowly uninstall apps that I knew ran in the background (Adobe CC, cleaners, etc.) All... no luck. Booting in safe mode seemed to help, but def not a solution. So finally did a complete wipe of the system, installed 10.13.1 fresh from a USB with a newly downloaded copy to make sure it was the most current. One by one I installed all of my working apps (mobile dev here so a lot of apps to install).. so far, everything has been installed for about a week now. Not a single crash, nor lockup. System has actually saved quite a bit of disk space by the fresh new installs (guessing all the garbage left over after upgrading to High Sierra that was never purged, and old app data, etc). System runs quite a bit cooler since the reinstall, fans not kicking in near as much, etc. Seems to have done the trick. My guess is, with Apple completely changing the file system this round of OS updates, there were most likely some small bugs or conflicts with other software (as others have mentioned here). However, just shy of uninstalling apps one at a time and reinstalling, there would be no real way to solve what was causing the conflict. And if it were old files from a previous update (such as Adobe's new larger update to the CC Suite for example).. those files may remain if their installer failed to delete the first time. So many possibilities for these system panics that for me the safest solution was a nice clean install (always good to do that ever so often anyway.) Was a huge pain... but nowhere near as frustrating as the past few weeks of constant lockups and system over heating. Back to work here and best of luck to all here... hope this helps. FYI... not only did I reinstall, but I unplugged for a hour before, rest PRAM/NVRAM, and did a memory clean just before wiping and install. Might not have made a difference, but as frustrated as I was, and knowing the work to completely reinstall all my system files... I wanted to be sure I didn't leave a single stone left unturned.

I had a similar problem with my 2015 MacBook Pro after the upgrade. Very high cpu usage made it impossible to do anything. It appears that High Sierra is much more sensitive to heat problems and basically goes into a no-op mode in an attempt to cool it off. I fixed this by taking the back off and cleaning all of the dust out of it, including vents and fans. After I did this, it worked like new. Open the Activity Monitor and check the state of the kernel_task. If you see it very high, perhaps even over 1000% cpu, you Lilly have the same problem.

I am officially no longer seeing any pauses/freezes in High Sierra, and this was even before updating to 10.13.3. The two things I did which seemed to fix the issue were as follows:

1. Followed Bone1971's recommendation to delete old entries in Library/LaunchAgents and Library/LaunchDaemon folders. I didn't delete all - just items which were obviously left over from old/outdated/unused software.

2. After making sure that my Time Machine backups were up to date (I run them to two different local backup volumes), I booted to the Recovery Partition, launched Disk Utility, deleted the boot partition, created a new boot partition, installed a clean copy of High Sierra, then restored all of my apps and profile settings.

BTW, I always use the Combo Update when updating the OS.

Things I did NOT do:
1. Update any video drivers apart from those updates supplied by Apple in Combo Updates.

2. Perform a clone or restore from a clone.
3. Swap out my Apple-supplied SSD for one from a 3rd party.

My configuration: MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2015), 2.5 GHz Intel Core i7, 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3,

AMD Radeon R9 M370X 2 GB, Intel Iris Pro 1536 MB

I've had this problem too since installing High Sierra last November and have finally found a solution!!!

Not sure if you're all using secondary displays too?

If, like me you are using a secondary display, then try this 🙂

Go to 'Displays' settings in System Preferences and see if your primary/secondary displays are set to 'Default for display'

Mine was set to 'Scaled' and I changed it back to 'Default for display' -- taadaa! -- no freezing or hanging! 🙂

Unsure why this is a bug in High Sierra, but right now I don't care because I have exorcised the beachball demon! 🙂

Good luck!

I had the same issue since the upgrade for a while until a colleague spotted that McAfee fails to update properly and in this case, on High Sierra, the required update for McAfee isn't getting installed by McAfee services. Uninstalling it and reinstalling it will install the latest version.

And it helped ever since. No more freezes.

Cheers.

Try disabling any third party apps. I found that I had some apps that would cause this.

• Log out under the Apple in the Menu bar.
• Log in with the Shift key down. (Enter your password then hold down Shift before hitting Enter)
• This should disable most login items. If you still see any apps in the Menu bar, I suggest you quit those as well. Most likely it's a menu bar item.
• Test for the problem.

If it goes away, then go into System Preferences > Users & Groups and remove all login items. Add back one at a time if you are unable to previously identify which process is the problem. For me it was DefaultFolderX (later fixed in an update). Quitting the app caused the freezes to go away for me. It's important that all apps are updated!!

Hope this helps!

Revert your Mac to a previous macOS version - Apple Support

If your laptop is SSD, it was converted to APFS. See this link on how to reformat as HFS+

How to revert back to Apple's HFS+ from APFS - TechRepublic

How to Downgrade from macOS High Sierra | Other World Computing Blog

• Shut down your Mac.
• Unplug from power supply. Leave it unplugged for 20 minutes or more. (I had always heard just a few minutes would drain but Apple Support advised me leave unplugged for longer.)
• Unplug all your devices but your keyboard and mouse.
• Zap your PRAM

1. Shut down your Mac.

2. Locate the following keys on the keyboard: Command (⌘), Option, P, and R. You will need to hold these keys down simultaneously in step 4.

3. Turn on the computer.

4. Press and hold the Command-Option-P-R keys before the gray screen appears.

5. Hold the keys down until the computer restarts and you hear the startup sound for the second time.

6. Release the keys.

Restart holding down Shift Option Command R.

You can release when you see the globe.

Open Disk Utility and select your Macintosh HD. Erase. This will delete all data on the drive. If you don't have a backup you might try running First Aid, but I suspect to fix you will need to erase. Select HFS+ Mac OS Extended Journaled.

Quit Disk Utility

Select to reinstall macOS. This will install the original version of OS X that came on your Mac. When it completes, you can boot into the new install then select to upgrade to either El Capitan, Sierra or High Sierra. I would manually move files back if you go back to High Sierra.

To clean install...

Download OS X 10.11 El Capitan

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT206886

Download Sierra

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208202

I might suggest you wait on upgrading to High Sierra until it matures a bit.

I have the same system. I started with 10.13.1, but I had system-wide "stalls" frequently. 10.13.2 didn't improve anything. It seemed to happen more in Chrome, but I don't have much to back that up. I initially thought it was related to GPU switching, but I didn't see a difference when always on the discrete vs. integrated GPU. I had Duet Display installed, and after uninstalling, it seemed like there was an improvement, but that was short lived (and likely coincidental).

I was poking through Console logs and noticed that the stalls were close to log statements related to the Broadcom wireless chipset and Handoff. I tried turning of Bluetooth, and so far, the stalls are dramatically reduced. It's worth a shot.

I to believe the dynamically format of High Sierra is causing the slow down problems and I've cured two machines by erasing and re-formatting the SSD's to APFS. CCC let me than clone the drives back to original. Both times the results were incredible.. High Sierra is by far the fastest OS X and most reliable system yet if run on a proper formatted SSD drive IMO...

If you have a SSD drive and select to install High Sierra, the installer will format your drive as APFS. This does not erase your data. However, it seems that the conversion process from HFS+ to APFS with data on the drive creates problems for some users.

You can select to backup all your data as a clone backup to an external drive. Boot from your clone or the Recovery Drive and erase your internal drive. Install High Sierra on your internal drive. This auto converts it to APFS but there is no data to convert. After booting into your internal drive, manually bring over your data for best results.

I have found that High Sierra freezes for me due to some interaction with Time Machine on a remote disk. I have Time Machine configured to use a remote disk on another server and this had been working fine for many years. But since High Sierra (and likely due to APFS) it causes the machine to freeze and become unresponsive... Sometimes waiting a while will allow it to come back... sometimes I can ssh in from another machine and shut it down. I also notice when this happens that I'm getting local APFS snapshots in /Volumes that are taking up a lot of space (as reported by the Finder)... I've turned off Time Machine for now, deleted the local snapshots, and the problem has stopped for me.

Note: 10.13.3 is due out very soon!!! Wait to download the installer until 10.13.3 is released.

Your 2013 MBP should be fine with High Sierra. While you can upgrade over your current system, you'll get better results if you backup first as a clone. Boot from your clone and erase your internal drive then install High Sierra. When you install High Sierra, it will reformat your drive as APFS automatically. You can then migrate your data over to your new drive.

Because of the big change to the hard drive it's more important than ever that you have a clone backup before updating. A clone is bootable where Time Machine is not. If something goes wrong you can easily boot back into your clone and be backup working in a few minutes.

Software used to Clone:

CarbonCopyClonerhttp://www.bombich.com/download.html (All options are available free for 30 days)

SuperDuper!http://www.shirt-pocket.com/ (Free forever to do an erase and install. Purchased version allows for smart updates and schedules)

Do Not format your external drives as APFS.

Time Machine will not run on an APFS drive.

APFS only works on SSD drives. Not even necessary to format an external SSD as APFS.