Sleep Wake Failure: Reboots only after upgrading to High Sierra

I have spent the last month dealing with the sleep wake failure ordeal.


When High Sierra was released I took the upgrade like I always do. When my iMac goes to sleep I will be in the other room and can hear my system rebooting. The startup sound plays twice. Then the apple logo appears on the screen with and progress bar (as if something were installing) Once High Sierra starts it displays a message "Your computer was restarted because of a problem. "Sleep Wake Failure"


I have contacted Apple support on several occasions with no luck.

I have unplugged the cord - removed it from the computer for 15 seconds to reset the smc

I have reset the NVRAM

I have backed up my system using time machine and used disk utility on internet recovery to erase my iMac

I have done a fresh install of Mac OS (High Sierra) with Time Machine backup and a separate time without a backup

I have started in safe mode

Mac OS High Sierra 11.0.3

Even after doing all these tasks my iMac still reboots when in sleep mode.


I have had my iMac for several years and this has never happened before. Now it cant stop happening.


Any help would be greatly appreciated.

iMac, iOS 11.0.3

Posted on Oct 27, 2017 9:43 AM

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Posted on Jan 23, 2018 9:36 PM

I found that having "power nap" set on seemed to be the heart of my sleep-reboot issue. I didn't have the problem under HS until I turned power nap on and the problem ended when I turned power nap back off.

198 replies

Apr 19, 2018 12:40 AM in response to McBeave

It is heartbreaking to watch the number of people suffering this scourge keep growing daily. The absence of recognition and help from Apple is beyond cruel.


In an effort to identify any dependencies I have been trying various combinations of settings and work patterns to no avail. One strange effects seems to be presenting more persistently than random, so here is a brief description.


Every morning after a period of work for about 1-2 hours, on leaving the iMac briefly, for about 10 -15 min, the dreaded double chime of the SWF restart occurs. This seems to be related to settings of display sleep to 5 min and computer sleep to 10 min. The strangest thing is that later in the day, under similar circumstances and patterns of leaving the computer, the SWF does not occur (except for a few possible occasions when I cannot recall, what has happened before that). Moreover, almost always (again unsure due to having more important things to do than collect statistics) the iMac does not go through a SWF when sleeping overnight.


It is probably a wild guess, but perhaps a remote possibility would be some process(es) running after an initial wake up, that do not complete before the first 'computer sleep trigger' event - causing the SWF, after which later into a working day such process(es) are complete or less likely to be still running.


There are other considerations, related to power management settings, including 'Energy Saver' in 'System Preferences' in conjunction with 'pmset', which I shall leave to another post.

Apr 29, 2018 4:17 AM in response to janisfromhamburg

Thank you very much, Janis. This is probably the brightest flicker in this long dark and muddy tunnel of the Apple SWF experience. Ever since I started to keep track of the discussions on this thread (and the parallel one at Sleep Wake Failure with High Sierra 10.13.2) I have seen innumerable reports, describing various systems, setups and myriad of settings attempting to identify possible reasons for the darn SWF problem. Looks like individual circumstances could contribute to some extend, but that same variety also suggests that there has to be a common underlying reason. That reason unequivocally points to the HS OS update.


It is also evident that Apple Support staff are not in sync with the problem (with or without internal instructions not to acknowledge it). Some commentators on these discussion fora have suggested that we should not 'complain' here but go and raise the issue directly with apple support. While I agree with the latter and have personally been in contact with apple support, it is a fact that for so many months and so many reported attempts, not a single case has been mentioned, where apple support have been able to help resolving the matter. The discussions, especially here on the 'neatly' moderated apple website, should be taken into consideration and respected as a source of information from genuinely concerned and mostly supportive apple users. To deny their existence and the issues raised is plain irresponsible.


So, for once, there seems to be some hope that the SWF will be banished at last.

Jun 7, 2018 12:39 AM in response to McBeave

So much for my desperate hopes the SWF saga would be finally over. After a month with the .5 beta without any problems, the dreaded double-chime of the SWF reboot returned. This is only a quick recap for the sake of continuity.


My hopes were quietly propped up by the lack of the usual daily notifications from the two SWF threads. Since people generally write more about problems than they do about the absence of such, it seemed there is a faint chance the solution might have been found, at last. Looks like it hasn't.


It should be pointed out that there definitely is a difference after the .5beta update in my case, at least. It has been a great relief that for a month my work was free of the daily SWF reboots, which I had mercilessly experienced for months before that. However, as I already mentioned in my first post .5beta update comment, it did not seem very convincing that a complete solution has been found, because the sleep state appeared different and not going to a hibernate-like mode.


For the sake of completeness, it has to be clarified that during all this time I always left the iMac to follow through the power management set period of display and computer sleep (5/10 min). Yesterday for the first time I used the 'apple menu' sleep command, which I used to do in the long distant past, before the SWF plague. It could have been coincidental, but having used the 'sleep' command combined with the passing of the arriving of 'autopoweroff' state, which most certainly invokes hibernation, appears to have caused this horrible SWF again, after otherwise uneventful and so much hopeful month.


Such a disappointment!

Jun 19, 2018 2:47 AM in response to McBeave

Looks like we have arrived. Considering the comments drought of recent, my conclusion is that SWF appears to have been resolved for most affected here. Most likely with the 10.13.5 update of HS. Well, it looked frustratingly remote and unclear as to how we get here but here we are.


My iMac has not experienced a single SWF since the 10.13.5 update, which can cautiously be accepted as resolved. It remains unknown what approach has been taken to provide the solution. In particular, whether any compromises have been made to power management and the system 'sleep' state.


Although I have no proof (as I had not been able to predict the months of SWF suffering, before it happened), it seems to me that before the dreaded 10.13.2 HS update there were two different states of 'sleep' - one, the 'hibernate' on 'autopoweroff' and another, intermediate one, where the computer will still wake up from a memory image saved to the persistent storage, going through the 'grey-screen-with-a-progress-bar' resume process, but somewhat quicker than the wake from an 'autopoweroff' state. Now it is not possible to be certain and will remain unknown, unless a good-natured apple source, confirms or denies it.


Nevertheless, it is undoubtly a huge relief and I can only be grateful to anyone at Apple who has contributed to resolving this problem, although I am not yet ready to forgive all those who refused to acknowledge the existence of the SWF issue for such a long time, even with at least a hint of an official statement, if they did not want to admit it publicly.


PS

It still remains to be seen, if there would not be any residual trouble for users, who might wish to change their 'standby' and 'hibernate' settings, which should not happen, for as long as these are perfectly normal options to set.


PPS


The following list of sleep reports is somewhat suspicious, if part of the SWF solution, because it replaces the problem with potential problems of possibly removing the benefits of ‘hibernate’ and ‘autopoweroff’, which safeguard by saving a memory image to the persistant storage.

sleep 10 (sleep prevented by coreaudiod)

sleep 10 (sleep prevented by sharingd)

sleep 10 (sleep prevented by coreaudiod, sharingd)
sleep 10 (sleep prevented by coreaudiod, apsd, mds_stores)


Hopefully, my paranoia will turn out unfounded.


Aug 1, 2018 12:38 AM in response to theuser869

Responding to theuser869: since my last detailed post on this thread around mid June, I have commented mainly at the parallel discussion on Sleep Wake Failure with High Sierra 10.13.2 I used to copy my comments over to both, but may have lost the consistency due to personal distractions.


Some recent developments in brief: after my initial enthusiasm about update 10.13.5 possibly solving the SWF problem, I had more than a month of crash-free respite, which almost allayed my suspicions about the solution. The reasons for my incomplete confidence (I think I mentioned those already) were the unusual sleep states my imac appeared to go to, which occasionally were somehow prevented for various reasons. In short, it looked as if the solution for the SWF had been to prevent the computer from sleeping, which is obvously not a userfriendly solution at all.


While I was waiting for anyone else to share their impressions from those developments, to my total surprise and utter chagrin my computer SWF-crashed again! several times! Then a fellow sufferer from the other thread pointed out that the 10.13.6 update has come out and I moved on, just like many other people appear to have done. Only a few days since then. No symptoms of misbehaviour so far. I can only hope.

Jan 1, 2018 4:51 AM in response to McBeave

I have a MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014) and after upgraded to High Sierra 10.13.2, I had a similar issue. My MAC do not wake up from sleep 😟 I always need a reboot to open the device and all my works has gone 2-3 times. Apple should not blame third parties or whatever. If 10.12.X has no problems and the same configuration with 10.13.X high sierra has problems, Apple should release an immediate fix. We are not paying these high prices for shine screen and dummy siri, we need a stable operating system. (Clean installation or other re-install options cannot be applied to my system. I have critical software installed and also had a limited time. )

Jan 5, 2018 3:35 AM in response to BJF788

Not sure where I got this idea from, but thinking out of the box, it would be really nice if apple had a place where users can post commonly recurring issues. Then apple could have their real engineers review the issues and post real workarounds or fixes (not reinstall). Even better, apple collects lots of information about user behavior. Maybe they should also collect problem reports about their own o/s when it fails unexpectedly. Sort of like a system"dump". That way, they would have all of the information they need to develop a fix, or they could contact the user directly if they need more information about the reported problem. hmmmm


Maybe the folks at apple are all trapped under a heavy desk or something and haven't been able to get to the phone since the high sierra release. Perhaps they need help. 🙂

Jan 5, 2018 9:57 AM in response to JoMiya

Every time this error occurs you can either manually send the log to Apple or it can be automated. I am assuming apple has seen this error many times, at least 8-10 from me alone so now the question is has it showed up often enough to get to the top of their list or are there other more pressing problems. It is also possible that several Apple engineers have tried to fix this but either it is a difficult problem or they haven't found the right engineer to work on it, possibly both. While it is possible they are not aware of the problem or are ignoring it, I find that both of these are unlikely.

I know in this day and age we all think our problems should be solved immediately but often that is not possible.

Just so you understand me, I also wish it were fixed and it ***** that it is not, it appears that the problem has been on going for some time.

Jan 23, 2018 4:42 AM in response to Hlohner

Sorry to say High Sierra 10.13.2 did not solve sleep reboot issues on my iMac. Would really love to have High Sierra working correctly on my machine. Apple MUST be aware of this issue, I just cannot understand why they don't fix it. I must say its the only Apple update I have ever had problems with. Are Apple just too big for there boots these days and don't care about their loyal customers. I have a iPhone 6 that even with a new battery needs recharging twice a day. An iPad 2 that runs slow as a two legged dog because I cannot put the original software on to restore its speed. Come on Apple I know you want to sell more devices but they are all expensive to buy so just HELP us a little more.

Jan 25, 2018 3:36 AM in response to MichaelCrandell

In case anyone is wondering, yesterday's 10.13.3 update has not fixed the issue either. Have rebooted twice since and sent apple 2 error reports. Maybe Apples spam filter is inadvertently blocking all of these error reports. Just a thought 🙂


Perhaps if we sent the error reports to Microsoft or Google instead, they might be able to lend Apple a hand. Frustrating!!!

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Sleep Wake Failure: Reboots only after upgrading to High Sierra

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