Debugging macOS High Sierra Freezes

[haralds]

Until High Sierra my macOS system has been super stable.

But since the upgrade I am having periodic crashes were the system hangs and just freezes. Apps go into Spin, Mail usually disappears. I have to force reboot.

There is no crash log to lead the way. I am stumped.

I have used the release version and Developer betas. There has been little change.

I am using APFS on a third party card. A filesystem lockup would quickly force all processes into waiting for IO completion.

Trouble is that the Installer does not give you an option for APFS.

Before I run through the Gymnastics of backing it up via CarbonCopy and then initializing and restoring with HFS+ from my Sierra partition, are there any other ideas out there to trace this down?

 

[MarkJames68]

Until High Sierra my macOS system has been super stable.

But since the upgrade I am having periodic crashes were the system hangs and just freezes. Apps go into Spin, Mail usually disappears. I have to force reboot.

There is no crash log to lead the way. I am stumped.

I have used the release version and Developer betas. There has been little change.

I am using APFS on a third party card. A filesystem lockup would quickly force all processes into waiting for IO completion.

Trouble is that the Installer does not give you an option for APFS.

Before I run through the Gymnastics of backing it up via CarbonCopy and then initializing and restoring with HFS+ from my Sierra partition, are there any other ideas out there to trace this down?

Which Mac Pro?

 

[haralds]

It's Mac Pro 5,1 with updated WiFi/BTLE card. I stopped all application and background apps started at login and that seemed to fix the issue. Now adding slowly back in to find the trouble maker.

 

[MarkJames68]

Sorry, can’t really help with the 5,1 but sounds like you are looking for a wayward driver issue. Good luck!

 

[H2SO4]

Make sure you have Activity monitor on and visible, maybe you'll catch the RAM maxing out or something?

 

[goMac]

Are you using an Nvidia card?

I'd be looking at that first before I/O issues. The Nvidia Metal 2 drivers are trouble, and High Sierra is all in on Metal 2.

This could also be related to a specific application tripping the window server in a weird way.

 

[haralds]

Are you using an Nvidia card?

I'd be looking at that first before I/O issues. The Nvidia Metal 2 drivers are trouble, and High Sierra is all in on Metal 2.

This could also be related to a specific application tripping the window server in a weird way.

I am using a Radeon card flashed with EFI and fully supported by drivers.

 

[haralds]

I think, I found the culprit. After some reliable running for a few days I was hard crashing a lot. I did get a few crash logs after reboot and they all pointed to APFS and SMB drivers.

I decided to do a final CC clone before redo when I noticed that a number of files were not readable. Finder could not delete them for that reason. It looks like the SSD had some "bad" blocks that were marked ok by APFS. My conclusion is that APFS on third party SSDs might not be that solid. I was running less than 20% free space and that might have created queue issues.

So I booted back into Sierra on another partition and used diskutil commands to remove the APFS container before initializing to HFS+. I then CC everything back. I would have to use the "starttoinstallos" command with the "--converttoapfs NO" to reinstall High Sierra, since the CC restored disk turned out not to be bootable. Alas, the shipping installer does not any longer support the --volume target option.

I changed the SystemVersion.plist to install Sierra and after the install removed the flag to make it a fresh install. Booting into Sierra I was able to set up an account and then restored the previous accounts. From there I installed HighSierra without converting to APFS. Still have to wait a bit to see, how that turns out.

I will let this run for a long time to check for stability before risking APFS again. Might wait until 10.14.

Quite a way to kill 1½ days grinding.
[doublepost=1509664671][/doublepost]Happy too early, ended up with configuration issues. Finally reinstalled from a USB installer after deleting /var /dev /network, and /System. More fiddling and I am back together after two solid days - with APFS.

Of course, iCloud insists on cleaning out all files and mail and starting over!

 

[haralds]

Based on some other posts, these events are actually freezes (beach balls) that might recover after minutes.

I found the drive firmware out of date and updated it. Still ran into the issue. Booting into my Sierra partition the system runs flawlessly. I was able to back up the High Sierra partition without drive errors. So I am concluding this is some sort of interaction with AFPS and the particular drive/card I am using. Since the thing locks the system drive, there are no logs possible.

Next step is to wipe the drive and clone a subsystem of Sierra (which has a superset of apps and content) using HPHS+ and run that for a while. If that works, I will do an upgrade in place attempting again to override the APFS conversion.

Sigh...

 

[pat500000]

feedback it.

 

[haralds]

feedback it.

I will bug report once I understand, what is going on.
[doublepost=1509905554][/doublepost]Ok. More info. These are actually long "spins" without always seeing the ball.

After updating my Sierra partition on a regular disk (apps etc. where out of date) to be usable, I cloned the APFS to an APFS disk to be bootable.

I then rebooted the APFS SSD and upgraded to the current 10.13.2 beta. Worked fine for several hours until l stress tested - CarbonCopy update of clone, VMWare running with a VM, launching a number of apps at the same time.

Frozen without a ball. But I waited. And 45 seconds later all was back to normal.

Alas, no spin report in the logs. Also noticed an easy beach ball after boot, when a bunch of apps auto load after log in.

Clearly disk IO related, since running CCC exacerbates the condition.

Looking to get logs to file bug report.

 

[haralds]

Just had a freeze >90s (I walked out of the room to get something to drink aft waiting 90s.) iTunes music stopped, but resumed after 20s. My menu clock was frozen for the duration.

Cleared logs so I'll have a fresh set for the next occurrence and then bug report...

 

[H.Finch]

I'm having exactly the same issue (iMac late 2012)... Have you found a fix yet?
My system freezes, all of it hangs, music stops playing, timers stop... mouse doesn't respond and after 90 sec to 2 minutes it all starts working again... This is my work-machine, so it's not good... (Also when i boot up I see a weird grey loading bar before the Apple logo, that looks like some firmware starting itself... really weird...)

 

[haralds]

No full resolution yet. Seems to mainly happen on heavy disk use like CarbonCopyCloning.

Also have full sporadic crashing which looks like some memory leak, but no logs to track down.

High Sierra is the most unstable release I have seen in years.

 

[haralds]

Identified and solved the issue. it looks like there is USB 3 driver contention or card issue on the two CalDigit FASTA-6GU3 Pro Cards I use. I had my 8TB Seagate USB3 backup drive hooked to one of the ports. The cards also support 4 internal eSata SSD including the system drive.
During heavy traffic the system would hard crash without error log. This was likely caused due to the system drive not being accessible.
I reinstalled my Inateck USB 3 card and moved all USB 3 connections to it. The system has been up for 3 days without crash while running full CarbonCopy clones.
Interestingly, both CalDigit and Inateck use the Fresco chipset for USB. I notified CalDigit, but the card is now obsolete. This worked under Sierra.

 

[atothek]

Similar post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/applehelp/comments/7lepgm/mac_os_10132_crashes_frequentlywhy/
[doublepost=1514406101][/doublepost]I'm seeing the same issue. Highly annoying. No crash dumps to speak of an the machine just hangs for 20s at a time, unable to perform any input. Moving the mouse works, but can't click on anything and keyboard commands are ignored.

 

[h9826790]

Try disable TRIM. My cMP run so much better with TRIM disabled (Latest HS official release, 840 Evo SSD, APFS).

On 10.12.6 or ealier, I always keep TRIM enabled without issue. But with HS, APFS + TRIM on 3rd party SSD obviously can cause issue.

 

[haralds]

Identified and solved the issue. it looks like there is USB 3 driver contention or card issue on the two CalDigit FASTA-6GU3 Pro Cards I use. I had my 8TB Seagate USB3 backup drive hooked to one of the ports. The cards also support 4 internal eSata SSD including the system drive.
During heavy traffic the system would hard crash without error log. This was likely caused due to the system drive not being accessible.
I reinstalled my Inateck USB 3 card and moved all USB 3 connections to it. The system has been up for 3 days without crash while running full CarbonCopy clones.
Interestingly, both CalDigit and Inateck use the Fresco chipset for USB. I notified CalDigit, but the card is now obsolete. This worked under Sierra.

Final update: it was not a card issue, but some corrupted configuration file. Restoring my home directory from an earlier version solved the issue.