Keep coming back to beachballs after long period no activity

Running Mojave on a Gigabyte Z87X-OC and it has been solid as a rock over the years. But recently I'm finding that if I leave the machine to go have dinner or be away for 2-3 hours, many times I'll come back and try to run a program but the program doesn't start and after a few seconds I get a perpetual beachball and have to power-down reboot to recover.

At one point I thought maybe it's just leaving Firefox and Thunderbird up while I'm away and something happens there but that's not the case. What changed? No idea really, this is a pretty quiet system as far as making changes or installing new stuff... it pretty much just runs the same **** every day. I do notice that if I'm active and doing stuff all day long, I never have a problem, it's only when the box is left to just sit there for a while. Really weird.

Just wondering if anyone else has seen this crop up?

eno

If everything is frozen except for the mouse and it beachballs, you might have a GPU crash. Check the logs for errors for things that say GPU restart, or GPU dump. I forget what the exact message is since its been so long since I dealt with this, but look around in the logs for anything GPU related around the time of the freeze. in my experience it would happen when casually using the machine and not doing GPU heavy tasks.