Sleep Wake Failure: Reboots only after upgrading to High Sierra

I just recently started having this issue a couple days ago. The only change that has been done to my imac is I finally purchased a 1tb ssd. This is on time machine and I wonder if its a glitch that when I do not have my ssd plugged into a usb it restarts. It keeps happening close to the same time every evening.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

Also, if you wanted to re-enable standby mode, run:

sudo pmset standby 1

Not sure, but you should probably reboot after both, just for fun.

Well 10.13.2 did wake from sleep once! Next time re-booted so back to Sierra, 4 hours of my life I will never get back! Come on Apple sort it out PLEASE.

Well, it seems that I talked too soon. Today Wake Sleep Failure start again after upgrade to macOS High Sierra 10.13.2.

I give up and I will return definitely to macOS Sierra.

I have updated to the latest. I restarted my computer. I have not had a reboot while in Sleep yet.

You could set as "never sleep" like me. But this is not a solution... It is very sad that Apple does not take all these feedbacks into account...

I installed 10.13.5 yesterday, unfortunate, but another 3 hours of my life gone with the same out come. Now back to Sierra again!

Preventing standby seems to me a step too far. I'll try hibernatemode 3 for now, let's see how that works out...

Hi fmiguel,

I have the same problem with my iMac 21.5'', Late 2012 with macOS High Sierra 10.13.1 but I don't kno how to see if I have a SSD OWC MErcury ....

How did you manage to downgrade to MacOS Sierra 10.12.6 ?

Thanks

Same problem here too. Once I put to sleep, after awhile it reboots and makes the start up sound. Sometimes twice. I come back to the computer saying it had to shut down. I send a report every time. I have yet to find a solution. I update every time as well.

iMac (27-inch, Late 2012)

Version 10.13.1

3.4 GHz Intel Core i7

32 GB 1600 MHz DDR3

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680MX 2 GB