Sleep Wake Failure: Reboots only after upgrading to High Sierra

Hello Tom,

Could you, please, check if your Power Nap (PN) option in the Energy Saver settings panel has been enabled. In a parallel thread at:

Sleep Wake Failure with High Sierra 10.13.2

there has been a discussion which suggests that with PN enabled the computer, may not go to sleep at all, which may appear as not spontaneous reboots and Sleep Wake Failures (SWF).

I would be more than happy if it turns out that the SWF problem has been resolved for good in your computer, but it might help others to know if there could be any link with the PN setting.

Thank you.

(this is a copy of my post at the parallel thread at Sleep Wake Failure with High Sierra 10.13.2 all references to comments are from there)

It has been a while since my first intention to attempt an assessment of apple’s power management settings (PMS) in relation to the SWF problem. In the meantime, forced by desperation, I went for a Beta update, following Procladius' suggestion that it seemed to do away with the SWF reboots. The good news is that it did make a difference and since I installed the 10.13.5 beta, about a week ago I have not had a single SWF event! The reason I am not calling in with jubilation is that the change is not entirely convincing. Firstly, as mentioned by jabesse, I have not enabled ‘disksleep’, which may have ruined my hopes. However, I experienced the innumerable SWFs while my ‘disksleep’ was off, so the situation with the Beta update is still (if only partially) different.

In short, it appears to me, that the 'computer sleep' mode is no longer the same as before the HS upgrade. I am not a computer expert and have no means of determining whether and to what extend the system goes into what is defined as ‘sleep’. Such definitions are not provided clearly enough for a user to be able to determine their effectiveness.

This post may become somewhat overly extended, but I hope it provides an informative overview of possibly useful PMS options.

For a start, the iMac I use allows three parameters to be set from the ‘System Preference’ -> ‘Energy Saver’ options:

- Computer sleep (from 1min to 3h to Never) - set to 10 min at present

- Display sleep (from 1min to 3h to Never) - set to 5 min at present

- Disk sleep - circumstantially (on/off), currently off.

These are part of a bigger set, available with the Terminal command, pmset -g, as given below:

System-wide power settings:

Currently in use:

standby 0

Sleep On Power Button 1

womp 0

halfdim 1

hibernatefile /var/vm/sleepimage

powernap 0

autorestart 0

networkoversleep 0

disksleep 0

sleep 10 (sleep prevented by sharingd)

autopoweroffdelay 14400

hibernatemode 0

autopoweroff 1

ttyskeepawake 1

displaysleep 5

standbydelay 4200

Although not immediately evident from the parameter names, Computer sleep and Display sleep are recognisable by the 10 and 5 min settings respectively. Leaving aside Display sleep, as unlikely trouble maker, it is interesting to notice that in addition to Computer sleep there are four other similar parameters, namely - standby, disksleep, hibernate and autopoweroff.

The setting of ‘disksleep’ is either ‘off' or ‘on' (when possible). Hypothetically, SWF could have been caused by demand on the disk, while it attempts to go to sleep, but this setting has been ‘off’ almost all of the time on my computer, while SWF has been occurring daily over the past four months.

Similarly, ‘autopoweroff' also seems to be unlikely culprit, as it powers down the computer after the 4 hours, set with the ‘autopoweroffdelay’, which in my case has been happening without signs of malfunction.

It then appears that the remaining three parameters, (computer/system) sleep, standby and hibernate may be somehow involved in SWF, given their interdependence, according to definitions. Starting with ‘standby’:

standby causes kernel power management to automatically hibernate a

machine after it has slept for a specified time period. This saves power

while asleep.

Apparently ‘standby’ effects hibernation after the machine has slept for a specified period of time. At the same time

standbydelay specifies the delay, in seconds, before writing the

hibernation image to disk and powering off memory for Standby.

On one hand standby should activate hibernation after the computer has slept according to the ‘sleep’ timer (set by the user), on the other, the activation should not happen before the time determined with ‘standbydelay’ (set by default to 1h10min on my iMac). On the face of it, the above should not be a problem as ‘standby’ is set to 0 (off) by default and does not seem accessible via the ‘Energy Saver’ controls. The twist, however, seems to be in the definition of hibernation.

In my case, which I suppose is not uncommon, standby and hibernate happen to be set to 0 (off presumably), the autopoweroff, however, is set to 1 (on) and it does come into effect every day for my computer (typically overnight or when I'm away for hours). Since not all three are set 0, it seems, according to the definition, that hibernate is not disabled completely. Even though hibernate is set 0 it obviously happens when autopoweroff is effected!

Conceivably, under certain combinations of sleep conditions hibernation is attempted, while it is not provisioned for and perhaps unrecognised apple system panics lead to those darn SWF events.

To wrap up, after upgrading to 10.13.5 beta my iMac has not experienced SWF, but it seems that computer sleep never takes effect, until time comes for autopoweroff, which appears to be trouble free. People have reported in the past that, when system sleep is set to ‘never’, SWF in some cases does not happen, but this obviously is only masking the problem, not a solution.

Still Waiting for a convincing completion of this dreadful episode of macOS High Sierra update.

If you are using a desktop, I fixed this by not using sleep (sleep never) in the preferences. You can still make the screen turn off and you can manually sleep using the right hand pulldown menu which in my case guarantees that the disk drive shuts down so the current draw is what ever it takes to keep the dram alive, this is virtually nothing.

While this is not ideal, I felt like I had spent too much time trying to make it work correctly, if you have a portable that needs to use batteries this is not a good solution.

So at the end the last 10.13.2 update solved the issue - MacBook 12 is running since 3 days without restarting...

Hi,

Turning off FileVault which decrypted info and disabling certain energy settings feature were the two things that fixed it this way

One week ago I disabled automatic copy of TimeMachine and I have had no more reboots.

Everything works more than fine now on my iMac mid 2010 with OWC ssd and OSX 10.13.4

We found the latest update change our hibernation settings.

Open a terminal window and run

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 3 standbydelay 10800 standby 0

This fixed the issue for us

Have you look at from terminal:

sudo kextunload -b com.apple.iokit.BroadcomBluetoothHostControllerUSBTransport

sudo kextload -b com.apple.iokit.BroadcomBluetoothHostControllerUSBTransport

& also

Holding SHIFT OPTION while clicking Bluetooth:

And resetting ?

Run this command:

$ sudo pmset -b standby 0

You will have to enter your password.

This has been suggested as a solution to the original problem of this discussion amazingly enough.

Still give it a try. I give it about a 1 in 4 chance of making any difference at all :-)

All I did was check the Energy Saver settings in System Preferences. The Display Sleep and Computer Sleep setting had defaulted to 15 min. I left Display Sleep at 15 min and moved my Computer Sleep to 3 Hours (then to Never -- it Sleeps when I tell it to sleep!). Problem seems to have stopped.

Not clear whether Apple Cares or not but it does appear Apple is not moving very fast to fix the problem.

Since I have an iMac I have decided to not use sleep, set up this up in energy saver by saying sleep never.

The screen and the hard disk will still power down but the computer will not sleep so it always comes up immediately.

I am told by a friend who does this for other reasons that the power consumption is very low in this mode and I believe it.

Today I was at the Apple Store in Hamburg. One of the "Geniuses" said, they knew about the problem of the SWF after updating to High Sierra. He also said, it should be fixed with the next macOS-Update. I hope thats true. They told me that the Update to HS could not be the reason for the sudden death of ma SSD. A coincidence?

I realise that sleep wake failure does not happen any more on my IMAC end 2012...

I am now on High Sierra 10.13.6. Finally, after almost one year, it looks like Apple did fix this bug in new OS that affected only older Macs.

I cannot say that my opinion towards apple has not been much degraded during this year, but at least I'm happy that the bug seems to be fixed.

They did the same to me. I sent to them the system report and as an answer they told me to put the original RAM and HDD. I made the downgrade to macOS Sierra and everything works OK.

Like I expected, the macOS 10.13.2 update solved my Wake Sleep Failure issue. Nevertheles, I made a fresh install of macOS High Sierra 10.13.2 and my Wake Sleep Failure disappear.