[kieran]

I have a latest generation iMac running the latest beta of Mojave. It's on pretty much all of the time as it's my media server, but lately, it's been restarting randomly overnight. I'll wake up and it's clearly back at a restarted state with all of the windows open.

Is there a way to figure out why this keeps happening?

[turtle]

Have you looked through the Console logs to see what they show? Normally there would be something indicate in there. "system.log" is normally a good starting point though you might need to dig through more of them. Of course, it really helps to know about when it rebooted just to make the log searching easier.

If it does it frequently enough you should be able to find why before too long.

[kieran]

So what would that look like? In all fo the years I've been on a Mac, I know what the Console is, but I've never had to dig into it.

[turtle]

I was trying to find a good example for you but it's not been as easy as I would expect. The first real issue is that I use a Standard user for my day to day use on my Mac. There is an admin user that I have for times when I need to do things that require admin. Reading the logs is an admin function.

So once I logged into the admin account to look over the logs I soon remembered why I hate combing through logs on macOS/OS X. There is so much clutter and crap logged that finding what you're looking for is just like the needle in a haystack.

I can say that normally you would have a period where the logging during one specific minute is really high. Instead of 10-20 for the minute there might be 100 or more logged that minute. So before that you would see what has logged and what happened right before shutdown/reboot.

This article talks about tracing out after a kernel panic, which might be what's been happening on your Mac. That or running out of memory and crashing.

[kieran]

I completely forgot about coming back and posting to this.

Thanks for that turtle.

Definitely not a KP though, because it has happened while I've been sitting in the room and there's no KP screen. The computer just seems to freeze up adn than restart.

I guess I just need to see what's running when this happens and then slowly go through and add things back to see what the issue is.

[turtle]

Is it possible it is a thermal issue and rebooting because of that? CPU overheats and triggers a reboot? They used to be widgets you could use to monitor the CPU for temp. Maybe there is something that is spiking the temp like iFlicks2 or some of that type of CPU intensive application.

[kieran]

That's what I was thinking. It does seem to be when iFlicks is transcoding, but it's also mostly overnight, so I can't really tell.

Hopefully the new release of iFlicks can help somewhat.

I do have it going in for a screen issue this week, so maybe I can ask them to look at the random shutdowns as well

[turtle]

I would definitely ask about the shutdowns. They might take a look at the thermal paste if they are going to have it open. Totally worth the mention.