spinning busy 'forever' when restart or shutdown

[jdw13]

This minor annoyance has been happening often since before Mojave. When I restart or shutdown, I see the spinning rotation busy and even after 10 minutes it is still going. I can power down and boot but I wonder, what can I do to figure out why this is happening? I have scanned the system log and don't see anything obvious to me. If some background app is not quitting, is there some place I can look to see who is at fault?

 

[Arcade]

Do you have any apps starting up when you first turn on your Mac?

 

[HDFan]

If you startup in Safe Mode (shift key on boot) does it make any difference?

 

[NoBoMac]

^^^This.

Might try and create a new account and see if better. If so, something in your account might be corrupt.

Personally, not as bad, but see slow shutdown due to iTunes taking a long time to quit. Mom's Mac had issues with Mail quitting (chalking that up to crummy Cox service for her email, but she has not seen that in a long while [not since Mojave]).

 

[jdw13]

Thanks for useful comments, but the problem is that this does not happen often or all time. It seems to happen more often when the machine has been on and running for a long time, a week or month? I do have three startups, in my login items

• CC User Agent
• DiskWarriorStarter
• BOINCManager

and I have tested with and without the BOINC but since I am not sure what happens to trigger this state, such testing with/without is ambiguous because the machine boots normally in both cases.

This is why I was asking if there was some way to find in the logs or somewhere to see just what the OS is waiting for while the screen is blank and unresponsive but showing the "spinning" icon. Is there some debugging that could be enabled to tell me?

 

[HDFan]

Sometimes you can get a clue by looking at the Console logs.

 

[jdw13]

I did look at Console logs, and did not see anything obvious to me. So, I am asking if there is some debugging that can be enabled so that there is some message in the logs to tell me what it is waiting for. Since the screen is already blank, and there is the rotating circle in the lower middle of the screen I would guess that Finder is already shut down, and my User has logged out? Since the "bong" has not yet been heard... I suppose that the Darwin kernel is still running and waiting for something to finish. (Just guesswork on my part.)

I've left the machine up four days, without quitting my startups, and have rebooted normally. The condition seems to happen only when my iMac has been up a long time. Perhaps it is just one of those things that I have to live with, but thought I would at least see anyone more experience in MacOS had any ideas on how the culprit could be identified. This issue goes back to El Capitan days, and seems to happen less frequently with Mojave, so there may be something with my iMac with external display and disks. (Seems, because I may just reboot less often with Mojave.)

I do have two external USB disks, one with two partitions and the other with three including the eDrive from TTP, so perhaps one of the disks cannot be 'ejected'. If a file is left open, I don't think the screen would be blank implying that Finder/User are gone... (my guess again)