Unity freezes MacOS, causes entire system crash

Question

Unity is regularly freezing up. It's always related to some interaction with the UI: selecting an object or zooming in or out with the mouse well. Unity becomes unresponsive, but the cursor continues to work. However, nothing can be clicked on in or out of Unity and the keyboard becomes unresponsive. After a while MacOS crashes without displaying the normal "Something caused the system to crash yada yada" overlay. It just shuts down and restarts. Does anyone else experience this? It's making it impossible to use Unity. This has been happening with all versions of 2019.3.

Unity 2019.3.13f1 MacOS 10.15.4

Answer 1

Answer by loten · Oct 30, 2020 at 12:37 PM

Had this issue suddenly pop up in Unity 2020.1.6 and later versions (only during play mode). I had used 2020.1.6 without any issues whatsoever for 2 months before it appeared and now its frequent. It's been happening since I significantly increased the number of UI components in my scene, basically from zero to a few thousand. Sometimes its possible to escape the freeze by pressing option+command+escape just when it starts to occur, without even having to force quit unity.

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Answer 2

Answer by robbanandersson · May 19, 2020 at 11:07 AM

I have similar issue (MBP 16" 2019), when I use the animator, the whole program sometimes freezes up, I see 2 tasks named "cfprefsd" taking 100% of my cpu each, Activity Monitor also freezes up so I cant get the PID to close it via terminal. even though the Unity icon is no longer displaying in the toolbar, the window is still there and I cant close it without restarting the computer...

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Answer 3

Answer by robbanandersson · May 19, 2020 at 10:32 AM

I have similar issue (MBP 16" 2019), when I use the animator, the whole program sometimes freezes up, I see 2 tasks named "cfprefsd" taking 100% of my cpu each, Activity Monitor also freezes up so I cant get the PID to close it via terminal. even though the Unity icon is no longer displaying in the toolbar, the window is still there and I cant close it without restarting the computer...

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Answer 4

Answer by Grimps · May 19, 2020 at 06:25 PM

When I notice this happening, there is no chance to open Activity Monitor, but maybe I'll try keeping Activity Monitor running to try and catch it. Someone on another forum mentioned it was only when a certain tab was open, so I closed all unused tabs, one being the Unity Store. Since then I have not had the freeze, but I am not optimistic that this will fully prevent it from happening again.

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Answer 5

Answer by koochy_rat · Jul 07, 2020 at 02:54 PM

I'm getting this regularly too. It is related to the Animator. Having it open and manipulating things in it frequently causes this cfprefsd hanging. Without the Animator tab open, it never happens. It's frustrating because once this happens the only way to recover is to reboot.

MBP 15" 2013, MacOS 10.15.4, Unity 2019.3.14

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Grimps · Jul 09, 2020 at 02:24 PM 0

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@koochy_rat I've never used that window, but the crash does seem to be related to certain windows. I've been keeping the Asset Store window closed and since my post, it has not happened again. Also, I've noticed it seems to happen right after updating Unity. And after a few fatal crashes, it seems to stop until I update again. I know this is all anecdotal information, but it's a very weird, inconsistent issue.

Unity freezes MacOS, causes entire system crash

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