iBook G4 won't sleep on its own

The only new thing I've installed recently is Temperature Monitor v2, but I don't see any components of it running.
BCLee wrote on :

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?

Brian C. Lee replied on :

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.

In article 970c56e9.0407260727.42bff777@redacted.invalid, bclee@redacted.invalid (BCLee) wrote:

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.

matt neuburg replied on :

Brian C. Lee bclee@redacted.invalid wrote:

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.

In article 970c56e9.0407260727.42bff777@redacted.invalid, bclee@redacted.invalid (BCLee) wrote:

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.

Joel Farris replied on :

matt neuburg wrote:

Brian C. Lee bclee@redacted.invalid wrote: 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!). [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.

Brian C. Lee replied on :

matt neuburg wrote:

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.

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?

Brian C. Lee replied on :

Joel Farris wrote:

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.

matt neuburg replied on :

Brian C. Lee bclee@redacted.invalid wrote:

matt neuburg wrote:

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.

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?

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

Brian C. Lee replied on :

matt neuburg wrote:

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.

matt neuburg replied on :

Brian C. Lee bclee@redacted.invalid wrote:

matt neuburg wrote:

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.

Brian C. Lee replied on :

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.

Joel Farris replied on :

Brian C. Lee wrote:

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.

Is the firewall on or off?

Brian C. Lee replied on :

Joel Farris wrote:

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.

Kwan Yeoh replied on :

Brian C. Lee bclee@redacted.invalid wrote:

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

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.