Sleep Wake Failure with High Sierra 10.13.2

A couple of days ago I updated my iMac to macOS 10.13.5 and today has been the first real day that I have been able to try my Mac since the update. I switched it on this morning at 8am and then put it to sleep and then this afternoon I woke up my iMac and for the first time everything worked without any issues. My iMac still wakes from safe sleep mode but this I can deal with but after it did it's thing, everything all worked OK and I did not get any sleep wake failure error message.

Currently I do not allow any bluetooth device to be used to wake my Mac up from sleep, I will re-actavite this feature soon and try it again. I'm not yet holding my breath that it might be fixed but at the moment it's defiantly looking slightly better.

I'll post again once I have switched on the bluetooth feature.

My iMac has been in safe sleep mode for most of today and I have just woke it up and everything has all worked ok with no error message. I'm going to leave it in sleep mode over night and see what it does in the morning.

So much for my desperate hopes the SWF saga would be finally over. Unfortunately, I did not have to wait for iDeMi's reply. 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!

10.13.5 seemed to have fixed my problems... I was occasionally getting SWF, but mostly my iMac27 2014 would just shut down overnight mysteriously with nothing in the system log to indicate that it even happened. In the morning I would get a double-chime as it seemed to boot twice. I believe it is a related problem to SWF which is why I'm posting here.

I upgraded from El Capitan to High Sierra about a month ago. Ghogoh's post on the sleep settings in terminal helped me figure out a solution a week or so ago—setting "standby" and "autopoweroff" to 0. I was finally able to sleep normally without an overnight shutdown. So thank you for that!

Upgrading to 10.13.5 early this week and things seemed fine the first night, so I tried "Restore Defaults" in the Energy Saver panel and confirmed in Terminal that standby and autopoweroff had returned to 1. The last 2-3 nights I've successfully woken from sleep in the morning! My problems seem solved!

Before, I was occasionally getting SWF. I *think* it was triggered if my machine had been asleep for 3-4 hours. So about the same as my standbydelay setting (10800). And maybe the autopoweroffdelay (28800) was causing the shutdown? Not sure as terminal activity seemed to point the shutdowns as happening after 5-6 hours. I have filevault enabled so I would wake to a login screen, but after entering my password the machine and mouse pointer would freeze. I had thought maybe it was related to my older madkatz mouse drivers, or maybe old Adobe updaters (I have various versions back to CS3 on my machine). I spent a lot of time cleaning out old Adobe stuff, but I think it was just a system problem as the update seems to have solved it.

So that's my info. Maybe part of it will help someone.

Pleased to read that things have started to look promising, Stitchy. Glad that some of my efforts have been of help. Thank you for your kind mention. Your comment is the closest to my understanding of the problem.

We may not be out of the woods yet, as I think that the 10.13.5 version may have only modified the 'sleep' state, so that hibernation now takes place only when autopoweroff is effected (typically after about 3-4 hours). This may only reduce the probability of processes clashing, as there is more chance for most completing, which could have been an issue with an earlier hibernation effect.

All this, of course, is still hypothesising before time or apple confirms the results. We hope.

My MacBook Pro (mid 2010) is connected via the power adapter. When I change the power adapter "Computer sleep" to 1 hour, my MBP crashes with a "Sleep Wake Failure". Below is the first few lines from the system crash report. As you can see in the report, my MBP runs the latest OS version. This Sleep Wake Failure does not happen when I disable sleep by setting the "Computer sleep" to "Never".

Date/Time: 2018-06-14 19:52:57 +0200

OS Version: Mac OS X 10.13.5 (Build 17F77)

Architecture: x86_64

Report Version: 26

Data Source: Stackshots

Event: Sleep Wake Failure

Duration: 0.09s

Steps: 9

Hardware model: MacBookPro6,1

Active cpus: 4

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.

This is really bizarre. I have not experienced a single SWF for two weeks after updating to 10.13.5. This is in complete contrast to the SWF reboots I had every day for months before that. Extended comment follows ...

Sorry to say that I just discovered this topic because this problem (which I had never experienced before) started for me AFTER I upgraded my iMac 2012 to High Sierra 10.13.5 recently. I'll describe it briefly, since it could be a new iteration of an old problem, or a new one: I can wake the Mac up from "sleep," with the keyboard (which is wireless), the desktop appears and, while nothing's missing, everything is "grayed out," and it takes about 45 seconds to a minute before the color returns. (Because it's Pride Month, I think of this as my computer waking up in Kansas and then taking a while to get to Oz.) At which point, my bluetooth mouse is not recognized. I can fix that by turning the mouse off, and then turning it back on, but this won't work unless I wait about a minute to 90 seconds after the color returns.

Bottom line? A wake-up function that used to take perhaps 2 to 3 seconds now takes about 2.5 minutes. So, it looks like Apple didn't solve this problem. Maybe they decided to spread it around more broadly so they can claim it's a feature rather than a bug?

I actually was considering buying a new iMac, but I've put that on hold. If this kind of thing is going to be a regular occurrence, I may go back to Windows. It's so buggy and crashes so much that users having to dive into the code to fix things is both expected and accommodated. With a Mac, you're just kind of stuck with whatever Apple gives you, which is generally nice, but does sometimes look astonishingly like the flip of a middle finger.

Logan, from your description, what you're seeing is a "feature" called "Safe Sleep". After a certain period of time, the machine wakes in order to offload the contents of RAM to disk. Upon waking, RAM is restored from disk, hence the extended period of time before the machine is responsive.

Were I to guess, it's this feature that is causing the occasional "Sleep/Wake Failure".

A temporary workaround is to go to System Preferences-> Energy Saver and enable "Power Nap". This keeps the machine in a semi-awake state, preventing Safe Sleep and (at least for me) eliminates the Sleep/Wake Failures that were a regular occurrence with Power Nap disabled.

Logan, only a small addition to jtonn's comment, the SWF problem discussed in this thread involves arbitrary, unintended and complete system reboots. Assuming this not being the situation in your case, it could be related to my previous comment, suggesting that the 10.13.5 also modifies the pmset parameters default values (possibly in an attempt to address the darn SWF). It is unlikely that people have kept records of what the settings were before their updates, but if someone has this could help corroborate my guesses.

If it turns out that an automatic and unannounced change of a setting is used to avoid rather than eliminate the SWF issue, in some cases it may not work and in others, like Logan's for example, it could even make things worse.

Requiring specific parameter value limitations, in order to avoid underperformance or malfunction, at the least should be officially documented, if not completely removed, as parameter ranges should work for all allowed vaulues for all users without product performance deterioration.

I've had my Late 2012 iMac in sleep mode now for 4 days and have just woke it up and apart from it waking up from Safe Sleep Mode, everything has worked as normal, no error message and no random re-start in the middle of the night. From looking through the comments on the last few pages, there is one thing that I have done that has not come up in the last few comments of what people have tried to do. I have switched off the feature that allows my iMac to be woke up from sleep mode by any bluetooth device. I have not re-anabled this feature as I am happy to wait the 30 seconds while it connects to the bluetooth device than risk switching it on and the issues coming back.

I'm not sure what I can put here in-tearms of my settings set-up to help others, so if you have any questions please ask and I'll do my best to reply as quick as I can.

I use Parallels too and I think its "checking for update" don't cause the problem. Instead of this, every time that my Mac (High Sierra 10.13.5) goes to sleep mode I have to reboot later... and almost every time Parallels was running when the failure happened.

Greetings! I am having this issue too. My Mac is 2010 but it's still going strong! I upgraded to High Sierra. Has anyone resolved this issue? I was worried that it was my hard drive failing and I needed a new Mac but it seems that many people are having issues.

Please advise!

Many thanks,

It's really bizarre but I'm not experiencing SWFs anymore. I did anything, I keep waking my Mac up with Watch, and several proceses on course... Parallels with a Windows 10 instance running for instance. Everything is going right now. 😐