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 restarting because the 1tb is NOT plugged in. I believe it is the time of the night that it backs everything up and if it is not plugged in it searches for it and then does the reboots. I am going to leave it plugged in this evening and see if that solves the problem.

Sorry, I did not realize I needed to take you literally because it seemed so unlikely. So thinking about it another way, it might be possible that if the computer is woken out of sleep often enough i.e. doing backup it will not crash as often. It often took 8 or more hours of sleep for my computer to show the problem.

The computer should be smart enough to realize the backup drive is not available but then anything is possible although not probable.

Hi, I´ve been running High Sierra 10.13.2 for months with no issues. I upgraded to 10.13.4 a couple of days ago and the reboots started (with the log error Sleep Wake Failure).

Something happened during the upgrade, the iMac did a strange noise (the same that when the RAM fails) a couple of times, then it seems like if it entered into save mode for a minute but actually the upgrade ends (successfully?).

It's the first time something like that happens to me during an upgrade or fresh install (iMac mid-2010 with OWD SSD).

Regards

I have a 27” Retina 5K iMac, Late 2015. I wasn’t having this issue until High Sierra 10.13.4 update. I had the reboot, system wake failure problems when running the public betas of 10.13.4, so did a clean install of 10.13.3 and all was fine again. Now stuck with the issue following the 10.13.4 release. It’s really not good enough. Reset the NVRAM, SMC, erase and install, clean install. Nothing worked. Currently waiting on Apple technical.

Just hva eon my Late 2015 27" iMac and so far it seems to have helped. That being said, Time Machine was backing up the update so that might have kept the machine more powered on. Will confirm tomorrow.

Looked at power management log, woke up with hibmode=0, standbydelay=0 , in the morning, after update to 10.13.4

default should be hibmode=3 standbydelay=10800.

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 3 standbydelay 10800 standby 0 seems to have fixed this issue. We had 50% of machine effected and all work up normally.

It may be useful to note that 'hibernatemode 0' and 'hibernatemode 3' used to be the defaults for desktops and laptops, respectively. Perhaps people should be careful which value they choose, as there are only three possible - 0, 3 and 25, and the effect depends on the setting of 'standby' and 'standbydelay'. With 'standby 0', if I understand the definitions correctly, under default settings, desktops should not hibernate and laptops will hibernate when batteries are about to run out. 'Standbydelay', should only have an effect with 'standby 1', i.e. standby is on.

I am not completely sure how the different combinations of these settings interplay, so please do not take my comment as any guidance.

hi everyone. i have the same issue with my MacBook Pro (Retina, Mid 2012).

after i close the display it goes into sleep mode, after some minutes 2 startup sounds and then the error message "sleep wake failure".

the first time this happened at night, i woke up from the gongs and when i tried to start the computer on the next morning the SSD was dead!

In the apple store they told me if they would fix it, they had to change the main board for about 900 bucks or so. so i decided to try my luck with another ssd (Transcend JetDrive 725).

now the mac works again but the "sleep wake failure" is still there. i wonder if the software update caused the death of the original SSD? And after that offered me an insanely expensive repair?

anyways. it would be great if anyone knows how to fix this. i hope the error does not kill my new SSD too.

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.

Hi

Thank you for your time with this issue. According to previous posts Apple are unaware of it. I don’t believe them, it seems they either don’t care or can’t fix it, probably the second. It will soon be time for a new ios so they hope the problem will go away. Meanwhile people all over the world will be getting very frustrated with Apple, will stop buying their expensive products and change to Windows, sad but that’s life. Windows can now do all the things we need that once only Apple could provide.

Think on Apple!

Unfortunately, there is no sign of resolution for this dreadful SWF problem. The saga goes on at the expense of so many users. Looks like it has other manifestations, too:

Apple's magical quality engineering strikes again: You may want to hold off that macOS High Sierra update... • The Regis…

With no disrespect to the enormity of the issues associated with such unimaginably complex things like modern computers, it is the disregard of the difficulties experienced by so many people over such a long time that adds insult to the injury.

In case this comment goes through, just as an update on my experience - while some situations with the iMac crashing on the dreaded Sleep Wake Failure appear similar, there is no clearly identifiable pattern of running applications or connected devices.

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'm having the same trouble everyone here is reporting, but running the latest beta, too.

My report includes other variables yours does not. I wonder why?

standbydelay 10800

standby 1

womp 0

halfdim 1

hibernatefile /var/vm/sleepimage

powernap 1

gpuswitch 2

networkoversleep 0

disksleep 10

sleep 10

autopoweroffdelay 28800

hibernatemode 3

autopoweroff 0

ttyskeepawake 1

displaysleep 10

acwake 0

lidwake 1

This is only a quick response to pcpclafferty, ahead of a more detailed update on my observations since going to 10.13.5 Beta. My guess is that yours is a portable, for which the default power management settings are different from those for desktops (in my case an iMac, 21.5, late 2012). In particular your standby = 1 and hibernate = 3 are both 0 on the iMac. It is my suspicion that these settings are involved in the whole messy saga, but I have no definite understanding how.

As a working hypothesis, it seems that the actual(!) effect of the parameter 'sleep' (presumably corresponding to computer/system sleep) might be related to the problem. It appears that before my updating to the Beta the effect of 'sleep' involved going into a state similar to 'hibernate', even when my hibernate setting was 0. Now this does not seem to happen, which probably means that my iMac does not effectively 'sleep' (although I have no way of establishing this).

Since upgrading to 10.13.5 Beta, more than 2 weeks ago, remarkably, I have not had a single SWF event!! With great trepidation a couple of days back I turned on the disksleep, which initially was not ticked, so that I only have display and system sleep, in order to have the minimum of parameters active. The computer was going to auto-power-off at night, as before, mostly at night, and waking up normally. I am not confident enough to attempt changing standby = 0 and hibernate = 0, as months of SWF experience, daily!, has still not healed the scars.

In short it is my guess that your, possibly, default standby=1 and hibernate=3 may be causing the same issue as the sleep before the Beta presumably changed the effect of the latter.

Many people on this discussion have mentioned that preventing the computer from sleeping somehow removed the SWF problem, so you might try to set standby and hibernate to 0, if you are inclined to verify that hypothesis. However, this can only be a temporary cure and certainly not a professional solution to a problem of such proportions.

Apologies if the writing above is not sufficiently clearly structured. Hope to write an improved update before long.