Sleep Wake Failure with High Sierra 10.13.2

I have found that by resetting the NVRAM will work for a while. I only have to do a hard restart about once a week.

I found I never had the File Vault enabled in the first place.

I wondered whether to go back to Sierra as I have other problems with High Sierra Safari 11.1.

I’m old enough to remember when Apple’s proud boast was: “It just works”. We shouldn’t need to second-guess the variables that might - or might not - be contributing to this issue on individual user configurations.

No it doesn't - well, it might for a few, but I like many others have never had File Vault enabled. Now this next comment is just another observation - it's not a fix, on my two iMacs with very similar setups, the late 2015 has never had a problem, but the late 2013 has been plagued with SWF issues. Since installing 10.13.5 beta 2 neither machine has had a problem, so something in 5 Beta 2 must be interacting differently.

"It is the disregard of the difficulties experienced by so many people over such a long time that adds insult to the injury"...

THIS is exactly how I feel... I understand if there is no current fix to this annoying problem. It's a huge nuisance, but for the most part, that is all it is, a nuisance. With the exception of the SXF, my computer works well, and I like Apple products. What I do not like is the absolute silence on the part of Apple. I think people understand that sometimes there is no fix available and that it takes time to determine what the fix might be if one exists. I'm so frustrated with the silence. Acknowledge the problem, say 'we are working on it' and I think consumers will appreciate the candor. I know I would.

I totally agree with you. The latest Apple rep that I have worked with on the SWF problem says that Apple won't even say if they are working on the problem. High Sierra has been causing the SWF error on my computer since the day I downloaded in November. I am more fortunate than many users since some member in this forum told me that enabling PowerNap stopped their computer from stalling and restarting daily. It has worked for me but HS still screwed my machine up because every time I turn PN off I get the dreaded SWF. Candor and honesty on Apple's part would help. Of course not releasing faulty operating systems would be nice too. Good luck to all of us whose computers are having sleeping problems.

I spend hours talking to Apple Customer Support over this issue, and they are totally clueless. They will always try to get you to reinstall your OS, which I have done twice now, and although the problem disappears for one to two weeks, the problem always comes back. I took it to a Genious Bar, and the "genius" representative suggested the same. My advice is to live with it until Apple catches up to the issue, is less frustrating than dealing with their customer support.

Just an update on my post last week. Since installing 10.13.5 beta 2 the problem has stopped, so something in 5 Beta 2 must be interacting differently. I've had no swfs since installing it. I appreciate not everyone wants to try beta releases, but has anyone on here had problems with 2? it would be interesting to know. I could just be lucky!

Thank you, Procladius. I have never installed beta versions (mainly due to lack of confidence, as I am not a computer expert), but the SWF is so intrusive and has been a daily pain for many months now, that I consider giving it a try shortly. Will post updates, eventually.

This issuing has been affecting my early 2015 MacBook Pro 13" Retina for quite some time. I am on the beta program (currently on 10.13.5 17F45c) so I expect some problems. I turned of the "Put hard disks to sleep when possible" option and it appears to have corrected the problem. This setting seems unnecessary on SSD machines.

I've recently being having issues with my late 2012 iMac and this sleep wake failure issues. My iMac is on macOS 10.13.4 and this issues has only been occurring over the last month.

My iMac has also been going into Safe Sleep mode as well when in sleep for over 4hrs which from reading an Apple support document this is normal with all Macs made before 2013 and it should have always been going in to Safe Sleep mode since day one but it has never done this, as I say it only started have these issues with sleep/wake in the last month.

I have been in touch with Apple but they were not much help, all they advised me to do is carry out all the basic stuff like resetting, refreshing and starting my iMac in safe mode and then to wipe and install my macOS again. All this has been carried out, twice, with no change.

I keep finding my iMac has had to restart itself and when I look at the fault report it shows me it just says a sleep wake failure.

I'm currently trying the tips in the last post, hoping this may have an effect.

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’:

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

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.

I set hibernatemode to 3, after which my system kept running fine for quite a few days. Then, a new build of the beta arrived, and I started seeing the problem again. Just now, I went to see how things are set: hibernatemode was back to 0! I set it back to 3, and now we wait...

What a load of crap. The fact that we are all having to endure this with no official response from Apple's support is an absolute trash reflection of this company today. We should not have to meander through all of these suggestions in order to have a functioning machine.

Just found this thread after suffering for 2+ months.

Constant crashes during sleep on both a brand new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar and a brand new iMac.

Both running 10.13.4.

Just saw that 10.13.5 is available. Going to give it a shot now ...

It's been a few months now since I had this issue, but I wanted to be sure it's not coming back a week or two later.

This will probably not be the case for all, but for me, this was triggered somehow by the Bluetooth.

I've now been turning off the Bluetooth before sleeping my Mac. I have a USB mouse connected and I use it to turn the BT back on after waking the machine. That is an ugly workaround, but I did not have this sleep crash for over two months now.

Again, some people reported that the issue happened to them with the BT off but in my case, it looks like it's preventing this crash.