Mac Pro awake but not

[Angelus]

Hi everyone,

I'm looking for some help with my Mac Pro 5.1 (originally 4.1 but flashed to 5.1). I've tried searching but can't find a solution.

My issue is that over the past few months I've noticed a pattern wherein either in the morning or at random times during the day I'll notice that the Mac looks asleep (ebbing white power light) but I'll hear the fans running and the disks spinning. If I push the Apple Pro keyboard keys or click the Magic mouse nothing happens. I can't seem to make the screen wake. It continually registers as not receiving any input from the tower and then I'm stuck. I need to use it for work purposes but the only way to make it useable is to force reboot by holding the power button.

Initially I would notice this every few days but it's becoming more frequent and I really don't like the idea of having to hard rest my Mac. I have backups/redundancy measures in place but this is not normal.

Does anyone have suggestions on how I can troubleshoot? I tried resetting the PRAM a few weeks back and the problem seemed to go away only to now return with a vengeance.

 

[kalisz]

I've been encountering the same problem since I originally bought my 2009 Mac Pro. It is really annoying and I haven't found solution through 8 years...

 

[Yahooligan]

Similar problem with my wife's 5,1, when sleep is enabled it will wake up every 2 hours or so on its own, not turn the display on, and then go back so sleep a minute or so later. If I attempt to wake it up all the way then nothing happens and it also never goes back to sleep, so I have to do a hard poweroff by holding the power button. Waking it from a normal sleep is fine.

My solution was to just keep it awake 24/7.

 

[mattspace]

Sleep problems an be caused by some pretty weird things - check your printer queue in system prefs. if you've got an old print job spooled to a printer that's no longer connected or on your network, that will interfere with sleep. So will energy saver settings, wake for network access, wake for bluetooth if there's a lot of conflicting wireless traffic etc.

If you're cabled into ethernet, try disconnecting the cable when you put it to sleep to eliminate network traffic wake requests, or weidness.

It might help to enable ssh login, and then when the symptoms are happening, ssh in from a different machine, and run Top to see if there's a process that's eating a whole bunch of CPU while frozen. I remember on a mini years ago, whenever I woke it from sleep, windowserver would crash, resulting in a powered up, but black screen. You could still fileserve from it, and ssh in, but Remote Desktop and all physical IO would be dead.

 

[Yahooligan]

I had all of that disabled, checking the logs it always showed RTC Alarm, RTC Maintenance , and then some mDNSreponder messages.

This 2-hour wake problem has been a problem for years with no reliable fix.

 

[mattspace]

try unplugging the ethernet after sleep / switching wifi off before sleep then - there are some oddities that can be caused by your router. I had an issue a while back where iTunes WIFI sync wouldn't work - but every other wifi function, airdrop, file sharing from an app on he phone internet access etc worked fine, it's just that whatever it was on the router that allowed iTunes to see the phone over wifi had crashed silently. Reboots of computer and phone, manually entering IP addresses and bypassing DHCP etc, no avail. reboot of the router it all worked fine.

 

[Yahooligan]

I've stopped worrying about it, it's my wife's Mac and I'm not going to have her jump through hoops just to try and get it to stay asleep, it'll just stay on 24/7 instead like the other Mac desktops.

 

[Angelus]

Sorry for the delay in replying. Works been very busy. Thanks for all your replies.
The day after I posted this it happened again so I tried turning off "wake for network access" and the problem hasn't appeared since. Fingers crossed that it won't come back

 

[Ludacrisvp]

Yes it is the wake for network access feature. It must power up enough to readvertise that it is on the network periodically for this function to work.

It shouldn't stay like this for more than maybe 30 seconds and go back to normal sleep. If it causes any issues and you aren't using the feature I'd turn off the feature. I disabled the feature on mine years ago.

 

[Yahooligan]

Yes it is the wake for network access feature. It must power up enough to readvertise that it is on the network periodically for this function to work.

It shouldn't stay like this for more than maybe 30 seconds and go back to normal sleep. If it causes any issues and you aren't using the feature I'd turn off the feature. I disabled the feature on mine years ago.

This isn't always the cause of the wake. This and other features have been turned off and it still happens. It's a known issue with no reliable fix that's been happening for years. It's not always waking up for the network.

Glad that seems to have helped the OP, though.

 

[Squuiid]

This isn't always the cause of the wake. This and other features have been turned off and it still happens. It's a known issue with no reliable fix that's been happening for years. It's not always waking up for the network.

Glad that seems to have helped the OP, though.

Yahooligan, totally off topic, sorry, but wanted to flag your Mac mini SSD, the 500GB 840 EVO.
Do you happen to be running the latest firmware on that which addresses the performance deterioration?
If so, is performance any good since applying?
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9196/samsung-releases-second-840-evo-fix

 

[Yahooligan]

Yahooligan, totally off topic, sorry, but wanted to flag your Mac mini SSD, the 500GB 840 EVO.
Do you happen to be running the latest firmware on that which addresses the performance deterioration?
If so, is performance any good since applying?
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9196/samsung-releases-second-840-evo-fix

Whoops, that SSD was moved to a Windows laptop and the Mini got an 850 EVO instead. I never use the Windows laptop, but thanks for the heads up. I'll make sure to update the firmware.