After Mountain Lion upgrade Mac sleeps and stops downloads

[firasrassoul]

I have a Macbook Pro from late 2011 with an SSD drive (that came from apple). It had Lion till a few days ago. The energy saver was set to 10 minutes for both screen and machine sleep. Back then, if I start downloads, run MacTheRipper, etc, and let it be, the screen eventually goes dark, and if I hit any button, I get the login prompt, I log in, and see that the downloads are still going on, and MacTheRipper is still ripping, and I even see that some emails have appeared, etc.

This all changed when I upgraded to mountain lion. Now, the mac goes to sleep and when I come back and hit any key to wake it, I log in and find that my downloads have been "paused" and mactheripper too. MacTheRipper picks up where it left, of course. But the downloads have to be restarted.

I looked on the net, and I found this new feature: PowerNap. Except that my mac is not the Retina one and so it is incompatible with that. But as I describe above, it used to behave just like they describe in PowerNap!!!!

Can I get that behavior back???

Has anybody experienced this as well??? What did you do? Just live with it??? I hoping there's a way to have that behavior back. I don't want to set the machine sleep time to "Never" and then back to 10 minutes, and so on and so forth!!

Help!!

 

[bphillips330]

I am having the exact same issue. How do I fix this?

 

[firasrassoul]

I am having the exact same issue. How do I fix this?

glad to see someone else has encountered this! i'm not going crazy after all!!

but what is the fix??? anybody??

 

[netnothing]

Looks like Apps are going to need to be updated. From John Siracusa's review:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/07/os-x-10-8/18/

In Mountain Lion, OS X no longer pays attention to disk activity when deciding if it's OK to put the system to sleep. Instead, Apple recommends that applications make what Apple calls "power assertions" as a way to tell the OS when they're doing some useful work that the system should stay awake for. This policy allows the OS to put the system to sleep the moment there are no applications still holding power assertions to prevent the action.

-Kevin

----------

Instead of messing with the Energy settings....just use Caffeine when you want the machine not to sleep:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/caffeine/id411246225?mt=12

It's not the best solution as it doesn't know when apps finish...but might be a way to prevent the sleep when you know it's going to be doing things.

-Kevin

 

[firasrassoul]

just use Caffeine when you want the machine not to sleep

-Kevin

yeah. that's what i'm currently doing. it is not as good as the original behavior was, though. too bad they didn't keep that as an option. i don't think that was a bug. i think it was a feature!!

 

[netnothing]

yeah. that's what i'm currently doing. it is not as good as the original behavior was, though. too bad they didn't keep that as an option. i don't think that was a bug. i think it was a feature!!

Well once apps update themselves, you should be back to the old way.

Do you use safari for the downloads? If so I'm surprised Apple doesn't allow safari to keep the machine awake.

-Kevin

 

[firasrassoul]

Well once apps update themselves, you should be back to the old way.

Do you use safari for the downloads? If so I'm surprised Apple doesn't allow safari to keep the machine awake.

-Kevin

good idea! i'll try using safari for downloads, rather than firefox, and report what happens

 

[Repo]

Apparently Apple didn't get their own memo. Time Machine has failed multiple backups because of this issue.

 

[bbb555]

thanks for the Caffeine tip !!

my energy settings were set to 15mins for sleep (default).
i've had my mac pro running vmware fusion (2 vm's running) and coming back from lunch, my mac pro is quietly sleeping.
I even had the Xcode update running overnight via the Mac App Store fail due to the mac pro going to sleep.

today, with Caffeine, all is back to normal
though I wish Apple would revert back to Lion sleep - as I prefer my vm's to remain online and also time machine to finish its nightly backups before going to sleep.

 

[firasrassoul]

Well once apps update themselves, you should be back to the old way.

Do you use safari for the downloads? If so I'm surprised Apple doesn't allow safari to keep the machine awake.

-Kevin

You are absolutely right! When it is Safari downloading, the computer display sleeps after the 10 minutes and if I hit any key I get the login screen. And the download is still on when I log back in. Just as before.

So I guess once applications update things will go back to what they used to be.

Thanks, Kevin, for the explanation.

 

[mindlessmissy]

So I guess once applications update things will go back to what they used to be.

Seriously, instead of forcing EVERY app to update its code, why couldn't Apple just leave a feature that was working perfectly ALONE ???

Just like their fullscreen Linen fiasco !

 

[Michaelgtrusa]

Widespread from what I hear. Same issue for me.

 

[keaide]

I have the same problem on my Mid2010 iMac. Installed ML and tried to download Civ V from the Mac App Store... download pauses every time my Mac goes into sleep mode... what a mess...

 

[firasrassoul]

Easy solution for downloads: for now use Safari

More general solution: it seems they have actually included a new command to control this behavior!!!

Run: man caffeinate

Got this from: http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20120801003744629

 

[Mackan]

So Apple wants us to suffer until all apps we use are updated to use power assertions?

 

[firasrassoul]

So Apple wants us to suffer until all apps we use are updated to use power assertions?

Well. Not really. Like I said, Safari solves the problem with downloads. I mean, it is not a big deal using Safari for the downloads, right? At least till firefox updates.

And for other applications, you can run the command line caffeinated to manually create the assertions for either specific applications or globally.

Of course, things will get a lot easier once applications get updated.

 

[Bakery Hill]

I posted this earlier on another forum. Similar problem but not exactly the same as Power Nap should resolve the OPs issue but it appears it doesn't.

"I'm not too convinced this Power Nap feature is actually working as intended. As a test I left my 2012 MBA on overnight, had sleep set for 15 mins and Power Nap enabled in the Energy Settings.

This morning when I got up, I 'woke' up the MBA and found that email started to flow in after I woke it up – email that should have been received between 12am and 2am and in my Mail inbox already had Power Nap done what it says it should."

 

[Mackan]

Well. Not really. Like I said, Safari solves the problem with downloads. I mean, it is not a big deal using Safari for the downloads, right? At least till firefox updates.

And for other applications, you can run the command line caffeinated to manually create the assertions for either specific applications or globally.

Of course, things will get a lot easier once applications get updated.

Can't use Safari for torrent downloads, so no, doesn't solve the problems. And if I leave an encode going during the night with Handbrake, it goes to sleep after 15 min. In other words, suffering...

It's not very Apple-like that we have to resort to some command line utility. But I will check that utility, thanks.

 

[KingArthurVI]

Before ML, I used JDownloader on my rMBP to download stuffs. What I did was:

1. Initiate the downloads
2. Turn on caffeine
3. Move mouse to top left corner of screen to make my display sleep (I enabled hot corners for that)

What happened was, my display slept but the Mac wasn't sleeping. After ML, somehow display sleep overrides caffeine, even, and everything just stopped. My external HDD which was doing routine backup kept blinking for a few minutes then the lights just went off, like my whole Mac was sleeping. The next morning, I woke the rMBP from sleep and saw that the download only progressed for about 2-3MB from when I left it to sleep.

Disappointing, really.

 

[Hippocrates04]

Same problem - not good enought apple!

Can't say how annoying this is. Having all the same problems.

 

[colloc]

Before ML, I used JDownloader on my rMBP to download stuffs. What I did was:

1. Initiate the downloads
2. Turn on caffeine
3. Move mouse to top left corner of screen to make my display sleep (I enabled hot corners for that)

What happened was, my display slept but the Mac wasn't sleeping. After ML, somehow display sleep overrides caffeine, even, and everything just stopped. My external HDD which was doing routine backup kept blinking for a few minutes then the lights just went off, like my whole Mac was sleeping. The next morning, I woke the rMBP from sleep and saw that the download only progressed for about 2-3MB from when I left it to sleep.

Disappointing, really.

I've read that the problem is there only for Macs with 'Power Nap' firmware update installed. It messes up the anti-sleep software somehow.

I have a 2012 MBP with ML, Power Nap unsupported, and InsomniaX works just fine.

 

[TSether]

2009 MBP is going it Sleep with MT Lion

I am having the same problem on 2009 MBP so the problem is not limited to just machines that support power nap

 

[jmpage2]

Yes, I am running into this myself with a 2009 iMac. The machine will go to sleep even if I am ripping a disc, encoding with handbrake, etc.

In the past I used the "exceptions" option in PleaseSleep to prevent the machine from sleeping when these apps were running and it worked very well. The machine slept when I wanted it to, UNLESS one of those apps were running.

This is all new totally busted. Thanks Apple.

 

[gamov]

NFS file serving also stops

ML also doesn't care if nfsd is serving files!! Last night, I was watching a movie with my wife when suddenly the movie hung; ML had just slept the computer! We have been watching movies this way since 2009... it's just horrible.
Previously, OS X was gracefully handling that and preventing TRANSPARENTLY the computer to sleep if there was activity...

Anyone has an idea how to force ML to honor activity?
Gam

PS: Anyone has checked if sshd also get cut by sleep in the middle of a session?

 

[Tankmaze]

also having this problem with mountain lion, aggresively put the machine to sleep even when i'm encoding video, downloading files, streaming content to apple tv.

right now the only solution for me is set the energy saver to never.

I've read about caffeinate [command_to_run] -arguments
but it is quite a hassle to setup caffeinate for every application that runs.
really disappointed in how ML handle this.

hopefully apple would bring update to bring sleep elegantly like it did before.