Mac Mini 2012 - Screensaver stuttering

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Level 1

8 points

Mac Mini 2012 - Screensaver stuttering

Hello,

most screen savers are stuttering on my Mac Mini 2012 with 16 GB RAM and 500 GB Samsung 850 EVO SDD. This occurs with Catalina and Mojave as well.

This includes Mac OS Standard Arabesque and Flurry, and as well non-standard Aerials.

If I play the Aerials videos directly in Quicktime, then no issue at all.

The behavior is always the same, screensaver runs fine for three to six minutes and then the frame rate dramatically drops. Clicking on the screen or hitting any keyboard key brings up the Catalina login screen, and couple of seconds later the screensaver returns to normal frame rate (without logging in).

I used activity monitor to monitor CPU usage (incl. CPU history enabled while screensaver is running). There is nothing usual bothering the CPU, one of the four logical cores shows a peak at 75% to 80% due to maybe some background tasks, but basically the other three cores are bored.

Energy Saving is set to Never/Never, but did not change anything. It somehow feels the machine is either busy or tries to save energy, but both is not plausible compared to CPU load and energy settings.

Any ideas appreciated, Thank you in advance.

Best regards,

Stefan

Mac mini, macOS 10.15

Posted on Oct 21, 2019 12:18 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Stefan_80 Author

Level 1

8 points

Nov 25, 2019 9:50 AM in response to Stefan_80

To finally answer this, the root cause of the stuttering is system load produced by a background task mediaanalysisd.

This is something about video indexing and video metadata, similar to photoanalysisd that is used e.g. for face recognition.

The problem immediately stops after disabling medianalysisd.

I re-enabled it then and kept it running for like 2 days to get the job done, and seems the issue is now fixed.

Best regards,

Stefan

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Answer 2

Stefan_80 Author

Level 1

8 points

Dec 22, 2019 5:52 AM in response to dunric

Keep it running with a blank or very simple screensaver (like Fliqlo), so that mediaanalysisd is fired up running doing it's job.

If you want to test if it is really the root cause, you can disable it with

launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.mediaanalysisd.plist

See here:

https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/idling-for-10-minutes-causes-sierra-to-lag-freeze-for-a-couple-of-minutes.209661/page-43

Other option is to remove the .plist file, but this works only in recovery mode and system integrity protection disabled.

It's a bit annoying that is cannot be configured in any way.

Best regards,

Stefan

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Answer 3

MoonJ.

Community Specialist

Oct 28, 2019 5:24 AM in response to Stefan_80

Hello Stefan_80!

Thanks for reaching out to the Apple Support Communities. I understand that you’ve noticed the screensaver is running slower after three to six minutes. You’ve done a great job checking the activity monitor and verifying your energy saver settings.

The next thing to do is to try to isolate the issue further. First, restart in safe mode and test again: Use safe mode to isolate issues with your Mac.

If still occurring in safe mode you’ll need to create a new user and test it out again. This article will show you how: How to test an issue in another user account on your Mac.

If you still are experiencing the same issues with the screensaver, message back and let me know if the issue began before or after you installed the SSD drive. Also, is it still occurring with all the screensavers, or only the 3 you mentioned?

Enjoy the day!

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Answer 4

i_rina

Community Specialist

Nov 3, 2019 2:16 PM in response to Stefan_80

Hi Stefan!

Great thinking installing and booting from an external drive! Since you're able to run macOS Catalina and the screen savers from an external hard drive you've isolated the issue to either the SSD drive, or the installation of Catalina.

Definitely start by reinstalling macOS Catalina from the recovery partition: Reinstall macOS. If the issue persists, try a clean install without any of your data. If it's still persisting after that step, you know the issue may be with the SSD drive, since it's working from the external hard drive.

All the best!

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Answer 5

Stefan_80 Author

Level 1

8 points

Nov 2, 2019 11:00 AM in response to MoonJ.

Hello,

thank you for the helpful answer.

I tried safe mode. The video is stuttering all the time in safe mode, it's not possible to normally play it.
I tried a new user account. The behavior is exactly the same and it does not fix the problem.
It seems to occur with all screen savers. Even very simple ones, like Filqlo showing a simple clock, show lags in the animation after a couple of minutes.
The problem started long time (years) after the SSD was installed. I can say it is unrelated to this to this change.

Thank you for your help in advance!

Best regards,

Stefan

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Answer 6

Stefan_80 Author

Level 1

8 points

Nov 3, 2019 1:49 PM in response to Stefan_80

Hello,

in the meantime I installed a fresh Catalina on an external drive and booted from the external drive.

I installed the Aerial screensaver as example additionally and it just runs fine, there is no issue at all.

So there is no issue relative to my problem with out-of-the-box Catalina, no issue with the screensaver itself and no issue with the hardware. So I guess I need to go for a new install, first try by reinstalling Catalina and restoring my user account from Time Machine, and if this does not work, it seems I need to go for clean install.

Best regards,

Stefan

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Answer 7

dunric

Level 1

39 points

Dec 21, 2019 9:01 PM in response to Stefan_80

Will have to try this solution of yours out. Was given a 2012 Mac Mini with a core i5, 250gb SSD, and only 8GB of memory.

I’m on a fresh install of Catalina with only some basic apps and my media library. I had suspicions that MS Office 365 might be causing this but if you test the screen saver from the display preferences, it just screams along. Running by itself? It averages about two frame a second just running “flurry”.

Will simply let my Mac run for a few days and hope for a cure for the stutters. I’ve also ordered a 16GB memory upgrade which is simple to do on a Mini, hoping that the extra memory will help too.

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Answer 8

i_rina

Community Specialist

Nov 3, 2019 12:11 PM in response to Stefan_80

Hi Stefan,

Great job isolating the issue to occurring across all users. At this point the best step to take will be to Contact Apple Support for more assistance.

Cheers!

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Answer 9

i_rina

Community Specialist

Nov 25, 2019 10:00 AM in response to Stefan_80

Hi Stefan_80,

Great work finding the source of the issue and resolving it. If you have any questions down the road, we're only a message away.

Enjoy the day!

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Mac Mini 2012 - Screensaver stuttering

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