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I have a Mac which regularly runs into a problem. The user interface stops reponding, showing a "frozen" user interface. The mouse is still moving but clicking does not trigger anything. This happens about once a week. Solution so far is to force switch-off the Mac and reboot it.
I have ssh root access to the Mac. Killing (kill -9) the active application has no visible impact on what is shown on the screen.
Any ideas on how to diagnose this?
Is there a way to restart the window manager from the ssh shell? Killing /System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Frameworks/CoreGraphics.framework/Resources/WindowServer seems not to be possible.
The Mac is an early 2008 iMac and runs Lion with latest updates. /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports is empty.
Update:
Problem stays after update to Mountain Lion.
The WindowServer process is in "uninterruptible wait" state ("U" flag in ps output set):
imac:~ root# ps ax|awk "NR==1|| /WindowServer/"|grep -v awk
PID TT STAT TIME COMMAND
86 ?? Us 50:51.69 /System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Frameworks/CoreGraphics.framework/Resources/WindowServer -daemon
Any idea for diagnosing what blocks the process?
Any idea for "waking up" the process?
Rather than DiagnosticReports, check the All Messages output under Console.app – slhck – 2012-05-25T08:52:59.247
Can one access the Console.app output from the ssh session after the machine froze? Otherwise I would need to run all applications non-fullscreen in order to have Console.app always visible. That would be rather uncomfortable. – Bernd – 2012-05-25T10:33:31.313
I think most importantly
/var/log/system.log
, see alsoman syslog
– slhck – 2012-05-25T12:43:10.697I did check /var/log/system.log. The last entry before the freeze happend is >15 min. before the freeze happended. ("imac SoftwareUpdateCheck[3036]: SoftwareUpdateCheck (Launch): non-admin user" and "imac com.apple.launchd.peruser.503[205] (com.apple.softwareupdateagent): Throttling respawn: Will start in 1500 seconds") – Bernd – 2012-05-25T12:49:52.030