Sleep Wake Failure with High Sierra 10.13.2

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Desktop and I found out, that it's function "check for update" is causing "sleep wake failure".

I did the same - twice. A total wipe and fresh install will not work if your computer is susceptible.

In the end I reinstalled Sierra and hey presto - it works again.

I finally got a solution!

Disabling FileVault fixes this annoying issue.

Now I can sleep without shutting down my iMac. 🙂

Spec

iMac Retina 5K 27-inch late 2015

MacOS 10.13.4

OK, So it's related to the screen, Apple did something ...

Many has uninstalled Duet and similar programs, anything that is related to the screen seems to be an issue.

I removed Parallels Toolbox and now it wakes up again, I have no idea way that is.

Try to disable or uninstall anything that is screen related, and list you're finds here.

T9

I have noticed that when my iMac reboots itself, the "Time Awake Since Boot" seemed always to be a round multiple of 1,000 seconds (e.g. 49000s). Seeing ghogho's post above lends credence to that.

After noticing that a couple of days ago, I suspected that a timed process was trying to start and failed. I've never seen the need to turn on "Power Nap" in the Energy Saver preference panel, so I generally turn it off after an install of the OS. For grins, I decided to turn Power Nap back on again. It's been 2 days now since doing so and my iMac has been behaving normally. I would be curious to see how many folks that are experiencing the sleep/wake problem also have Power Nap turned off.

jim.123 wrote:

Thanks for this. Obviously I would backup everything all over the place anyway before doing it, but would this be a clean install (i.e. total wipe) or would it wipe out just the High Sierra OS and replace it? I can't wait to get back to using Sierra!

Jim

Wipe and installing high sierra didn't help at all for me. Reinstalling 10.12.6 is the only fix which has stuck.

This is the classic voltage droop issue.

let me add some insight into this. Every microprocessor has something called vmin which is the minimum voltage that is needed for certain Fmax. in the case of this issue, the new operating system has the code running in a way that demands higher instance electrical current that the power supply system and decoupling capacitors cannot provide anymore. this causes the Vmin dip below the threshold therefore causes the wakeup fails. Apple could do several things to amend this. One, to rewrite the portion of the operating system to control the electrical current steps caused by the wakeup, aka, power gating, so that it doesn't cause the Vmin issue. Second, Apple could change their power gating code in a way that raising the voltage supply when it enters into sleep mode so that it has higher initial power supply level to prevent the Vmin dip below the threshold.

Hi Benjamin,

sorry about that! ((

Just to let you know: I got this problem not a single time anymore since I've removed my Citrix Receiver. My iMac sleeps well for 2-3 weeks already (with multiple times waking up daily)..

Roman.

I've come across same problem too.

Temporarily we can prevent that bug by disabling sleep option.

System Preferences > Energy Saver > Select "Prevent computer from sleeping automatically when the display is off".

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.