Application Not Responding issues after upgrading to Big Sur

[Achiever]

This weekend I finally made the plunge and upgraded to 11.2 (and then 11.2.1) on my iMac. Since then, I have had issues using Finder and Word, wherein the apps either won't launch, or freeze up with the pinwheel of death and the "Application Not Responding" prompt. I have plenty of RAM which is unused and therefore not a reason for the apps freezing up. Interesting, especially with the Finder, killing the app and trying to relaunch it doesn't always work. Plenty of times it will not let me relaunch the Finder or Word. Logging out of my user account works about 50% of the time (the rest of the time it freezes with a pinwheel not he shutdown screen).

Anyone have these issues when upgrading to Big Sur? I have never had these particular issues under any prior OS. Thanks in advance.

 

[Achiever]

This weekend I finally made the plunge and upgraded to 11.2 (and then 11.2.1) on my iMac. Since then, I have had issues using Finder and Word, wherein the apps either won't launch, or freeze up with the pinwheel of death and the "Application Not Responding" prompt. I have plenty of RAM which is unused and therefore not a reason for the apps freezing up. Interesting, especially with the Finder, killing the app and trying to relaunch it doesn't always work. Plenty of times it will not let me relaunch the Finder or Word. Logging out of my user account works about 50% of the time (the rest of the time it freezes with a pinwheel not he shutdown screen).

Anyone have these issues when upgrading to Big Sur? I have never had these particular issues under any prior OS. Thanks in advance.

As a follow up to this, I had four support chats with Apple yesterday and the problem is still not resolved. So far they have had me boot into safe mode (which apparently addresses some issues) and reinstall Big Sur. Neither of these have worked. The computer runs fine after a reboot, but anywhere from 5 minutes to an hour later, an app will freeze up. A related issue is that TM isn't completing a backup since the upgrade a few days ago (it keeps stalling at the same place). They say it might be related, but aren't really looking into that at all right now.

If a solution is found I will post it for future searchers. I still welcome input from anyone who has experienced this and has a solution.

 

[Honza1]

I assume you used DiskTools to check the drive is OK? Do First Aid. I had one time system problem of my SSD and it kind of looked similar, Finder hanging after some time. Apple ended up replacing mainboard of my MBP, since SSD is soldered in.
My ultimate - ugly - suggestion is to clone the drive to external drive, boot on recovery partition, wipe drive, format again, and install fresh system. Setup test user there and verify this does not happen on new clean system. If that is OK now, use migration assistant to move your stuff back.
1. If problems are present with fresh clean system, it is hardware issue or driver problem for that type of iMac (unlikely, this would be well known by now, but possible)
2. If the problems start happening after you migrate back, it is something with your setup or applications. You could have something obsolete incompatible which causes crashes of these applications (some Finder extension or something). Especially if this is older system with lots of crud, it is possible.
in each case this at least points you to something to investigate more.
3. If all is OK, you are lucky and can go on with your life.

There are variations of this - you could install clean system on external drive and try to run from there. That avoids invasive reformat of system drive.
Whatever you do, make sure you have Carbon Copy or Disk duper clone of your system, may be even two, just in case.

 

[linus38]

My mac is a late 2013 MacBook pro and I have exactly the same problem as Achiever.
The problem occurs after a computer stop of, let say, a night long. At restart, Mail.app, Contact.app, Message.app, etc. enters the "Application not responding" status while Safari.app is always Okay. Even TextEdit.app may crash (I never experienced a TextEdit crash before since Tiger!)
In my case logging out of my user account and immediately logging in makes the computer behaviour back to normal.
I already performed the basic actions (DiskTools, Onyx.app disk clean up, search and removal of old apps, ...) but not yet tested a full disk reformatting.

 

[Achiever]

After many hours on the phone with Apple Support (escalated) there are two things which seem to have solved the problem. The first was an SMC reset. But while that seemed to resolve much of the app crashing, there would still be occasional issues and Time Machine still would not back up. It was resolved with my getting a new HD for TM, formatting it for APFS and allowing it to back up anew. I did not carry over the old TM backups and just keep that drive (which is otherwise functional and mountable) in the closet in case I need to try and recover something older. It has been several weeks without issue since implementing these "fixes".

I would note that these problems all started with the upgrade to Big Sur from Catalina, and that the TM backup I had been running for several years had been working fine prior to that update and there is nothing wrong with the drive itself. So I am not sure what it was about the update which affected the drive, but it had to be something, and Apple Support has officially chalked it up to a bad drive being the root cause. Good luck to anyone else troubleshooting this.

 

[MacAddictPM]

As a follow up to this, I had four support chats with Apple yesterday and the problem is still not resolved. So far they have had me boot into safe mode (which apparently addresses some issues) and reinstall Big Sur. Neither of these have worked. The computer runs fine after a reboot, but anywhere from 5 minutes to an hour later, an app will freeze up. A related issue is that TM isn't completing a backup since the upgrade a few days ago (it keeps stalling at the same place). They say it might be related, but aren't really looking into that at all right now.

If a solution is found I will post it for future searchers. I still welcome input from anyone who has experienced this and has a solution.

Unfortunately you are not alone. I experienced the same issues you described, along with Spotlight indexing and never finishing. Spotlight results not being displayed during said indexing. My TM backup simply stopped working, got stuck in preparing for backup. Generally it was a complete train wreck. All of this on a 2017 iMac, running on an M.2 SSD with 64 GB RAM.

Thankfully, I had a CCC backup of my Catalina install, fell back to that and everything is back to normal. I might try again in the future, but as of right now, will stay on Catalina for the foreseeable future.

 

[Achiever]

Welp, the problem has suddenly re-appeared, but in a particularly strange way: Finder will never launch. This is only true on my user account (other user accounts on the machine seem to work just fine). I have tried relaunching, force quitting through Activity Monitor, logging out and back in, restarting, power cycled the computer, reinstalling Big Sur, deleted Default Folder X (the only Finder plug in I use) and even ran a terminal command to delete the Finder preferences. And I still cannot get Finder to launch on my user account (again, all good on the other user accounts). Any suggestions? Trying to avoid deleting my user account and having to bring it back from a TM backup, but there may be no other option.

 

[Achiever]

Welp, the problem has suddenly re-appeared, but in a particularly strange way: Finder will never launch. This is only true on my user account (other user accounts on the machine seem to work just fine). I have tried relaunching, force quitting through Activity Monitor, logging out and back in, restarting, power cycled the computer, reinstalling Big Sur, deleted Default Folder X (the only Finder plug in I use) and even ran a terminal command to delete the Finder preferences. And I still cannot get Finder to launch on my user account (again, all good on the other user accounts). Any suggestions? Trying to avoid deleting my user account and having to bring it back from a TM backup, but there may be no other option.

After some time on with Apple Senior Support, there was a fix that I am putting out there for anyone who has this issue in the future: the issue was iCloud Drive. When we went into the Apple ID in System Preferences, I could not access anything, but when I opened up Internet Accounts in SP, I was able to select iCloud and unselect iCloud Drive. I relaunched Finder and everything worked. I then rebooted the machine, re-selected iCloud Drive and everything has (so far) been good to go. For some reason, iCloud was giving an issue which was killing the Finder. Lesson learned.

 

[CuriousMacintosh]

Yes, just got hit with that Finder issue totally out of the blue. I don't even remember any update or anything remarkable on Friday, the thing sort of just started. Yes, I ended up completelly signing out of iCloud/Apple ID as whole and then Finder was immediatelly back to it's usual self! Aside from trying to reinstall Big Sur (I wanted to avoid that!) I also did pretty much everything else you listed as well. My hope was on the comming 11.3 update that could maybe fix it and I was going to wait for that before more drastic measures. I haven't signeed back to the Apple ID again, but it is good to know that the iCloud drive itself is the real issue so at least I could try to resume the other services. When Apple "just works" it's perfect but when it doesn't one just suffers all the pain that was avoided befere when things were "magical". Weird that an issue would be caused by its own system. Regreted the upgrade from Catalina, the cosmetical beauty is not worth it! (I love the Big Sur wallpaper though). I still have other minor issues actually since the upgrade…

 

[ewu]

I have tons of problem when I upgrade from Mojave to Big Sur.
JDK has .so file link missed,
after I fix, latest version of eclipse crash, vscode typing very slow. vmware has virtual network card conflicting.


I do a fresh install of Big Sur into my external SSD, all problems are gone.

so I suggest that you could do following way

1. if you are using fusion drive, don't use Big Sur on fusion drive,
you could buy external ssd to fresh install Big Sur.
if your mac has ssd drive, do fresh install Big Sur.

2. reinstall Mojave/Catalina and don't upgrade to Big Sur.