Thursday, August 31, 2017

Reliability of macOS Sierra: Scheduled and Background Activities

Howard Oakley:

In Sierra, the DAS and CTS dispatching system now manages more than seventy activities at most times, one of which is Time Machine’s scheduled backups. However, in Sierra at least, this system has a bug which results in its breakdown: backups suddenly become irregular or stop altogether, and the other activities also become unreliable.

When this happens, it is tempting to revert to scheduling backups using the older launchd mechanism, and that will certainly restore them. But it does nothing for the seventy or so other services which the DAS and CTS dispatching system manages. […]

For anyone needing to run their Mac continuously, particularly as a server, this is a devastating flaw. Although I and others have tried various solutions, the only way currently known to restore normal dispatching services is to restart the Mac. That is literally a showstopper for any server, and is more than inconvenient for many other Mac users.

Previously: Sierra Bluetooth Problems Due to GCD?.

Update (2017-08-31): Thomas Clement:

You can use TimeMachineEditor if you need a third-party Time Machine scheduler.

btw TimeMachineEditor used to be implemented via xpc_activity but eventually had to switch to a custom implementation due to various issues.

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Would someone please remind me what the point of Sierra was in the first place?

- Bringing Siri to the Mac.
- Adding SIP as a first step to close the platform.

SIP was introduced with El Capitan, not Sierra.

Good for security, and if you don't like it, it can be disabled. No big whoop.

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