Mac Os Mojave freezes

Well here I am, not writing from the comfort of High Sierra, but still from an uneasy spot somewhere un the Mojave desert. As a last resort before downgrading, I wiped my mac clean and did a Mojave install from zero. I've been restoring as little apps as possible (again from scratch), and will try to see if the crashes come back. Hopefully this clean slate Mojave installation behaves. I will try not to clutter it with unnecessary extensions, login items or anything besides what is absolutely necessary. If the crashes come back, then I'd definitely be saying Hi Sierra.

That's the thing about lock files--they're intended to block other processes from using a resource while the current process is doing its thing, so that you don't end up with multiple processes all trying to do, say, disk I/O at the same time. Usually it works like this:

1. A process checks to see if a lock file (*.pid) already exists, and if it does, it waits a prescribed amount of time before checking again.
2. If no lock file exists, it creates one and starts using the resource (e.g. disk I/O, etc.)
3. When the process is done using the resource, it deletes the lock file that it created, then exits.

But what happens if the process dies prematurely (e.g. a fatal error of some sort)? Well, the lock file never gets deleted, so every other process that wants to use that resource is stuck waiting, often indefinitely (which is where you see the lock-ups that force you to reboot). Some apps, though (e.g. McAfee's software) try to catch this with an independent "watchdog" process that periodically inspects the lock files to determine whether they've been orphaned (i.e. "stale"), and if it finds such a lock file it deletes it so that other processes can finally use the blocked resource.

The resource in this case seems to be disk I/O--any app that needs to read or write to the filesystem gets blocked, until the watchdog process clears out the stale lock files. Apps that don't need disk I/O seem to continue to run normally, but try doing anything that involves reading or writing to the filesystem and you get a beach ball. Might be a change on Apple's part with APFS, or might be sloppy resource locking on McAfee's part. For now I'll live without Real-Time Scanning, but like you I'm looking forward to a fix in a future update.

without much prospect of a fix appearing soon, i decided to follow the nvram command that's someone posted here: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8423529?answerId=33792287022#33792287022 perhaps this might resolve.

don't know much about it, but some light research revealed there is an nvram key missing, which this command is supposed to fix. wish i new more about nvram and any other keys which are missing that aren't supposed to be.

I have the dreaded issue on my 2012 rMBPro and don’t use McAffe at all. No other scanning package, as I installed Mojave from scratch after fully erasing my internal SSD. Kernel Panics are recurrent. I also tried disabling spotlight a few weeks ago and the crashes stopped for about a day and returned after that. I guess they simply were always there but happened randomly enough to make me think disabling Spotlight had fixed them. Same thing happened with Energy Saving settings. Following suggestions from some users, I tweaked these settings in a certain exact way, and that gave me a few days without crashes. But they eventually came back. Reading about this in Macrumors’ forums, there is another promising fix - deleting or desabling the Thunderbolt/Ethernet Bridge driver. A few users report no crashes after this. Maybe I’ll try this next, but I am a bit tired of this nonesense after struggling for weeks with a Mac that shuts down randomly.

Ok, good luck with High Sierra. Please keep us updated to see if rolling back from Mojave to the previous OS helps solve your freezing and crashes. Your MBP is a bit more recent than mine, so perhaps the issues are not exactly the same on our machines. Best.

Sorry I'm not sure if you mean you get a freeze after 4 hours or that it unfreezes after 4 hours. In my case the beachball appears and the system freezes specifically when I try to make a change to Accessibility settings in Security & Privacy settings - i.e. when I tick or untick a box allowing (or disallowing) apps to control my iMac. As long as I do nothing and wait the system unfreezes itself in a few minutes. Trying to get it to unfreeze using the various routes such as forcing apps to quit, restarting etc. won't work as (as I mentioned in my earlier post) all that happens is that all the keystrokes are buffered, and as soon as it unfreezes the various commands all kick in and it shuts down anyway.

After a lot of experimentation I found that my McAfee LiveSafe Real-time anti virus scanning function was a factor, and I get round the issue by disabling it before changing Accessibility settings and then re-enabling it. I had originally thought that is was a Mojave-related issue, but as stated by others I now think it was happening when I had High Sierra. I hadn't made any Accessibility setting changes for sometime, but while still on High Sierra I had a couple of problems with third-party apps that required permissions and although they downloaded OK they wouldn't run and timed out after I entered my admin password.

So I suspect that there's something relating to file access permissions at the root of the issue.

For reference I'm on an iMac (21.5-inch, Late 2013) with Fusion drive.

i have noticed that when i do choose the intermediate color theme (in Onyx) - where the status bar, notification panel on the right, and dock are all set to dark, but my windows and apps are set to light - that i don't encounter beachballing and freezing as frequently.

for instance, in the past 5 days since i set the theme, i've had only 1 or 2 unrecoverable freezes. just fyi, i never encountered a temporary freeze. it's always an unrecoverable

i am using the latest pb mojave.

In earlier posts, exCop suggested disabling the indexing of HD's, and that helped with freezes. I did that, and it helped somewhat. Freezing then started again. Under System Pref's, Spotlight has a privacy window. I initially dragged the hard drives in blank box. Yesterday, I undid this by selecting the individual HD, hit the minus at bottom, and returned Spotlight to its original condition. Since most of the freezes occurred during rapid scrolling in individual apps, I slowed the mouse movement in System Pref's, then took care to be less aggressive in scrolling speed. No freezes yet today as well. Don't know why, I attempted to freeze the iMac this AM, and nothing happened. So, still have no solution to the problem. Still think it is FS change.

zero, have re-enabled Spotlight for all drives, reinstalled Adobe Elements, and suddenly everything is working correctly. No freezes. Know I have said this before, but have not had freeze for 3 days.

Reason----think Apple wants us to buy new computers. I ordered and installed 32G RAM chips, taking out the 16 G's I had. Even on Photos, Aperture and iPhoto (each app has over 37,000 pics) no freezing when scrolling and or editing. By the way, not a good idea to edit pic's w/ Photo's editor. My late 2015, 27" iMac now very fast with no freezing. Hope I don't need to come back and eat my words. Thanks for all your efforts.

I think this will be my last post on this subject. Looking back over the 20 pages referred to,

• The issue is not specific to particular hardware - users have experienced it on old iMacs through to new MacBook pros, and with disk, fusion and pure SSDs.
• It did not start with Mojave - people had the issue with High Sierra, and those winding back to High Sierra from Mojave have not resolved the issue.
• A lot of the posts in the 20 pages are from the same individuals (including me). The reality is that if this was a widespread issue then a) it would be more widely reported and b) Apple would have acknowledged it and fixed it.
• There are a huge number of 3rd party apps out there, and is far more likely that the issue is caused by a conflict between the Apple OS and a small number of apps under specific set conditions than it being a fundamental flaw in the OS. For the most part Apple and the 3rd party developers do their utmost to ensure compatibility issues are trapped and resolved, but it is impossible to guarantee that some combination out there will cause a glitch, and in those circumstances it'll only be resolved by identifying the triggering action and reporting it to the app developer.
• And please, let's leave out the conspiracy theories claiming that Apple does this stuff deliberately to sell more computers. If this was a widespread issue they wouldn't be selling any computers.

SMC & similar hacks which do involve hacking around the boot menu etc. did not help earlier. Nor spotlight magic nor things like indexing etc.

I have just clean installed latest mojave. I installed some of my programs. After ~8-10 hours I got my first beachballing death.

What I'm trying now is trying to find out which 3rd party app/plugin might cause the troube. At the same time I also disabled iCloud. I have read on another forum that it really solved beachballing for someone.

Now I did not have freeze for ~10-12 hours. (I might have one soon.)

I propose making a list of the used third party apps so we can find out which might cause this.

So there is iCloud which is off now, and here is the list of Apps I have already installed and might cause some trouble:

• Audacity with plugins (I don't know the origin/name of the bundle but it seems to be a famous one)
• Alfred 3
• Unity Hub, Unity
• BetterTouchTool
• Caffeine

• Chrome - lot of plugins:

1. Save to Keep
2. Tabs Outliner
3. Dark Mode
4. ezLinkPreview
5. ColorZilla
6. Adblock (it has happened before installing this as well)
7. Trello Card Numbers
8. Stylish
9. Google Hangouts (it has happened before installing this as well)
10. Keyframes
11. JSON Formatter
12. Show PDF URL
13. Transover
14. Snappy Snippet
15. z-context
16. DevTools z-index
17. DevTools classes & attributes panel
18. ChroPath
19. DevTools Theme: Zero Dark Matrix
20. VisBug
21. Voila Web Screenshot
22. Element Screenshot
23. React Developer Tools
24. Redux DevTools
25. React Performance Devtool
26. Tab modifier
27. Pesticide for Chrome
28. PlantUML Viewer

• Contexts
• Fluid + some websites I have "installed" with Fluid eg. Google Keep, Google Hangouts, Messenger.
• iTerm
• Jetbrains Toolbox + PyCharm + WebStorm + Rider
• League of Legends
• LightShot Screenshot
• Spectacle
• Spotify
• Visual Studio Code
• XCode

Now I try to avoid using these or only using them one by one to find out which one is doing this.

Please share your 3rd party apps as well.

And a question: do you mind to use an app or site where you could input your app / hardware stack and would make it easier to share and collectively find out problem causes? I am wondering about creating such a site.

It's a current ASC pita. Note Old Toad included:

Use the [ click on ] Add Text button to include the report in your reply:

paste into the opened text box.

Or upload to some place on line, like pastebin.com or dropbox.com

R

i have a friend who has a newer 13" mbp for work and said his IT dept had set: Reduced Motion and Reduced Transparency in Accessibility\Display ....

I figured i'd give that a try and see how it goes. so far day 2 with iCloud turned on and those tweaks in Accessibility, no bb's of death ..... <<yet>>

In my case the latest version of McCafee has eliminated the freezing/beech-balling issue I had when changing access permissions. McCafee have been working on this for some time. There is still a delay when removing permissions (but no drama) but this still seems to be Mojave-related although I am on latest version. Anyway, things are much better if not yet fully restored to normal.

zero, how is it going?

To me disabling iCloud (after fresh reinstall and wiping out some 3rd party apps as well) has totally solved the issue! I am freeze free in last ~7 days!