[Solved] Slow Hackintosh after long periods of inactivity

[lazerbean]

I have a Hackintosh-build based off of the January 2017 recommended Customac Pro build descriptions running Sierra 10.12.2.

It has been rock solid until recently, but now, increasingly, I have been having issues.

Most notably, I now have to reboot almost every morning when I return to my Hack, as it has grown unbearably slow after a full night of inactivity. The same often applies if I go away for an extended period during the day and return. Often most or all apps have been paused because they're out of memory, and I have to force quit them. Still, the machine often remains unresponsive and unbearably slow, and I end up restarting when I can't take it anymore.

I have always had my Hack set to "Never sleep" in the power saving panel as I have loads of peripherals connected that don't agree with the Hack while booting, so I have to go through a tedious process of disconnecting and reconnecting lots of stuff during boot, and I also have loads of backups running overnight, which is another reason going to sleep isn't a good idea for me. So in theory, problems related to the Hack going to sleep shouldn't be the issue. It seems like it is whenever I return and my monitors have gone to sleep and I need to wake those (not the Hack itself as that is set to never sleep, right?) that the issues arise. I have set my monitors to remain active for 45 minutes (I do a lot of colour critical work on calibrated monitors so I don't want them to turn on and off as warm-up time affects colours).

At one point I also had this one popping up: "com.apple.PressAndHold (not responding)".

I would really appreciate any ideas about what may be causing this, as it is driving me insane currently. I'm in the middle of a big project, so don't really have time to go through a complete reinstall, although that will of course be last resort if I can't figure out what is the culprit and fix this problem in a more effortless way.

This morning I went through a series of processes in Onyx clearing caches, repairing permissions etc., and I restarted the Finder, and it is behaving well for the moment without a restart, so I'm cautiously optimistic - until next extended period of inactivity, that is.

I'd really like to find out the cause and fix it once and for all, rather than treating symptoms like I seemingly just did.

Edit: The small fixes above didn't last, as soon as I began launching apps again the beach ball started spinning and apps began to run out of memory again, have to reboot now...

FYI I also had a stubborn issue recently where the Hack refused to boot at all, it would crash when the progress bar on the black boot screen with the progress bar had reached about 90-95% every time, no matter what. In the end I managed to get around it thanks to advice some other place on this excellent forum which offered a solution using Diskwarrior on the original Hackintosh install/boot/restore memory stick, and that allowed me to run Diskwarrior and fix the corrupt directory structure that seemed to be the cause of the booting issue. But the slowness after periods of inactivity syndrome preceded that booting issue, just FYI.

Advance thanks for any help or advice - it would be most appreciated!

 

[lazerbean]

Okay, I will reply to my own post for the lack of any other answers.

In the end I went through a total re-installation, had a TimeMachine backup and restored all contents from there, so after a bit of fiddling with MultiBeast to make the drive bootable again, and troubleshooting and finetuning with Clover Configurator while reading and searching these forums to figure out my small issues, everything now seems to work fine again. These forums really are an invaluable resource!

Lost a days work going through the process, so ordered a second SSD disk now to keep installed in my Hackintosh as a second system drive for situations like this. I don't want to get caught in the middle of a large project with major issues like this again without a backup plan! I had originally intended to do this from the get go, but the Hackintosh surprised me by being so rock-solid that I got complacent and put it off indefinitely, but not again!

Also found an option to disable powernap in some settings under Clover, and ticked that off, as that may be related to my issues. It seems like the problems would start whenever using Adobe Photoshop or Bridge CS6 and leaving the machine for a prolonged break, so one of my working theories was that PowerNap could have something to do with it. Not sure of PowerNap was introduced after CS6 in which case CS6 may not like PowerNap, but this is just guesswork, I have zero knowledge of the inner workings of either CS6 or PowerNap. So far so good. I assume the worst thing that can happen is a slightly higher power bill, but I'd happily trade that against a rock solid and stable Hackintosh

 

[lazerbean]

After just a few days of use, my re-installed Hackintosh is now beginning to show the same symptoms.

I looked into the Activity monitor, and again I found "com.apple.PressAndHold (not responding)" - after quitting that and a few other resource hogs, Google drive being one of them, Adobe Core another, my computer is now running fine again without a reboot.

I haven't been able to find any info about the "com.apple.PressAndHold (not responding)" issue online - ATM this is my suspected culprit - but if anyone have some info to share, I'd appreciate a response. Thanks.

 

[lazerbean]

Will just addd to this that I began experiencing similar symptoms on my Macbook Pro (legit) and also Chrome becoming unresponsive while logged in on both my MacBook Pro and Hackintosh, and in the end decided to uninstall Google Drive completely. I've had zero issues after that. I'm quite astonished that Google Drive could bog down both of my computers to the extent of becoming unusable, but evidence points towards that as being the cause, so I will not let Google Drive near any of my computers again for the foreseeable future...