iBook G4 won't sleep on its own

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BCLee - 26 Jul 2004 16:27 GMT

My iBook won't go to sleep on its own (when it's supposed to according
to the Energy Saver settings) either plugged in or running on batter
power. It will sleep if I close the lid or select it from the menu,
but never on its own.

I've had the iBook for about 7 months and only started having this
problem in the last week or so -- I started noticing that I'd leave it
and come back hours later to find the screen had shut off but the
computer was not sleeping. I can't find any applications that I've
installed that are running and would keep it from sleeping. The only
new thing I've installed recently is Temperature Monitor v2, but I
don't see any components of it running. I've reset the NVRAM and PMU,
and repaired file permissions, no help. I see the same behavior from
both accounts on the system (one has almost never been used) so it's
not my account prefs.

Any ideas?

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Brian C. Lee - 26 Jul 2004 18:06 GMT

Just a followup: I've noticed that something is accessing the disk every
15-20 seconds. I haven't been able to figure out what yet, but I'm
wondering if this is what's keeping it from sleeping. Even when no one
has logged on and it's just at the startup screen it won't sleep and I
can hear the disk doing something every 15-20 seconds. Hmm.

> My iBook won't go to sleep on its own (when it's supposed to according
> to the Energy Saver settings) either plugged in or running on batter
> power. It will sleep if I close the lid or select it from the menu,
> but never on its own.
> <cut>

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matt neuburg - 26 Jul 2004 19:39 GMT

> Just a followup: I've noticed that something is accessing the disk every
> 15-20 seconds. I haven't been able to figure out what yet, but I'm
> wondering if this is what's keeping it from sleeping. Even when no one
> has logged on and it's just at the startup screen it won't sleep and I
> can hear the disk doing something every 15-20 seconds. Hmm.

You're absolutely right. An app or process can cause lack of automatic
sleep by accessing the disk repeatedly. My own app, MemoryStick, used to
do this (so download the latest version if you're using it!).

Also there is a windowserver bug that can cause this problem. The
workaround is to remove everything from your desktop folder. (Just put
it somewhere else.)

However, the fact that this is happening at the startup screen is really
weird. It sounds like you may be running a daemon process that's doing
this.

You can probably track down what's thrashing the disk with "du". It is a
little hard to use at first but you'll get the hang of it. m.

> > My iBook won't go to sleep on its own (when it's supposed to according
> > to the Energy Saver settings) either plugged in or running on batter
> > power. It will sleep if I close the lid or select it from the menu,
> > but never on its own.
> > <cut>

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Joel Farris - 27 Jul 2004 04:25 GMT

>> Brian C. Lee <bclee@spamcop.net> wrote: Just a followup: I've noticed that
>> something is accessing the disk every 15-20 seconds. I haven't been able
[quoted text clipped - 6 lines]
> by accessing the disk repeatedly. My own app, MemoryStick, used to do this
> (so download the latest version if you're using it!).

[snip the windowserver bug]

> However, the fact that this is happening at the startup screen is really
> weird. It sounds like you may be running a daemon process that's doing this.
>
> You can probably track down what's thrashing the disk with "du". It is a
> little hard to use at first but you'll get the hang of it. m.

To which I would ask, "What are the last three programs you installed on this
machine?" I suppose we'll find that one of them is responsible.

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Brian C. Lee - 27 Jul 2004 06:33 GMT

> To which I would ask, "What are the last three programs you installed on
> this machine?" I suppose we'll find that one of them is responsible.

iPod updater, Temperature Monitor v2, and Temperature Monitor Lite were
all installed around the time I started to notice this. None of these
run automatically, or at all in fact if top and Activity Monitor are to
be believed. (Temp Monitor will prevent sleep if it is running, and you
have a hard drive with a temperature sensor, and you have the HD temp
polling frequency set too high, but none of these are true in my case.)
Probably I only really noticed it after installing Temp Monitor
because I had temperature logs to look at that showed the CPU was never
sleeping. I had noticed the problem before that but hadn't realized
that it was something more than just an occasional thing.

Before this, in reverse order I installed:
iPod updater
wireless keyboard and mouse updater
Disk Warrior
airport extreme 3.4.2
itunes 4.6
AIM
security update
OS 10.3.4 update

That covers June and July. As far as I can tell from top none of the
stand alone apps are running. I would suspect Disk Warrior but I don't
have any automatic monitoring running. Searching on this I see a lot of
people, with everything from PowerMac G5s to iBooks, are complaining
about having this exact problem since installing the 10.3.4 update, so
I'm starting to suspect that.

Still, I want to figure out what keeps accessing the disk! I need a top
that lists the number of disk accesses by each process.

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Kwan Yeoh - 31 Jul 2004 10:26 GMT

> Before this, in reverse order I installed:
> iPod updater
[quoted text clipped - 5 lines]
> security update
> OS 10.3.4 update

My iBook 500 OS X.2.8 stopped going to sleep automatically around the
time I installed DiskWarrior. Don't know if DW is to blame, but there
was some approximate time correlation.

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Brian C. Lee - 27 Jul 2004 06:01 GMT

> Also there is a windowserver bug that can cause this problem. The
> workaround is to remove everything from your desktop folder. (Just put
[quoted text clipped - 3 lines]
> weird. It sounds like you may be running a daemon process that's doing
> this.

This is an interesting idea, I'll try it . . . but as you suggest, since
it happens at the login window and in the other account, I won't put too
much hope into it.

> You can probably track down what's thrashing the disk with "du". It is a
> little hard to use at first but you'll get the hang of it. m.

I don't see an option for reporting when a file was written, so I'm not
sure I follow you. A hint perhaps?

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matt neuburg - 27 Jul 2004 15:49 GMT

> > Also there is a windowserver bug that can cause this problem. The
> > workaround is to remove everything from your desktop folder. (Just put
[quoted text clipped - 13 lines]
> I don't see an option for reporting when a file was written, so I'm not
> sure I follow you. A hint perhaps?

Sorry, I meant "fs_usage", obviously. :) You'll need to run as root or
use sudo. m.

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Brian C. Lee - 27 Jul 2004 16:05 GMT

> Sorry, I meant "fs_usage", obviously. :) You'll need to run as root or
> use sudo. m.

Thanks. At the moment it's a bit of information overload (and nearly
all WindowServer and Terminal) but that should be useful in figuring out
what's doing this.

I tried the trick of moving everything off the desktop, unfortunately it
didn't help.

I did make some progress: I found 3 jobs stuck in the print queue. I
canceled those and restarted, and now the computer will automatically
sleep in the login window (at least before anyone has logged in) after
about 2 minutes (it's set to 1). I probably tried at least a dozen
other things between the last time I tried that and now, so I don't know
if the print jobs really mattered or not. It still won't sleep in
either my account or the plain vanilla account.

Thanks again for the help.

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matt neuburg - 27 Jul 2004 16:26 GMT

> > Sorry, I meant "fs_usage", obviously. :) You'll need to run as root or
> > use sudo. m.
>
> Thanks. At the moment it's a bit of information overload (and nearly
> all WindowServer and Terminal)

Right, but you can filter out anything you don't want to see. As I said,
it takes a little study, but you'll find that after a while you can
focus on just the thing you need to see.

For example, you are not interested in cache hits or getattrlists,
because they are not real disk reads. You probably, in fact, only want
to see disk *writes*.

You can also filter out any process that seems to be a red herring, or
explicitly list the processes you are interested in. And you can pipe
thru grep.

So it is not hard to turn this from info overload to a useful tool. It
has saved my butt many times. m.

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Brian C. Lee - 27 Jul 2004 16:40 GMT

Ok, so I don't know if this is a permanent solution, but it worked just
now . . .

From fs_usage I could see that airport was making regular disk writes,
every 15-20 seconds. So I shut off Airport, left it alone, and the
computer automatically went to sleep more or less on schedule. Now, I
did this same thing yesterday and it didn't work . . . so maybe it was
some combination of things. But at least at the moment, the airport
software appears to be the culprit.

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Joel Farris - 27 Jul 2004 18:50 GMT

> Ok, so I don't know if this is a permanent solution, but it worked just
> now . . .
[quoted text clipped - 5 lines]
> some combination of things. But at least at the moment, the airport
> software appears to be the culprit.

Is the firewall on or off?

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Brian C. Lee - 27 Jul 2004 20:14 GMT

> Is the firewall on or off?

On. Only remote logins are allowed.

A while after I wrote this, I found that sleep had started working again
with airport turned back on. So now I just don't know. But for now it
appears to be working.

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Mac Forum / General / Portable Macs / July 2004

iBook G4 won't sleep on its own