Hi there, I’ve been having an issue since upgrading my Macbook Air to Yosemite, which the 10.10.1 update hasn’t fixed.
Basically, KM runs fine after a reboot or restart, but after the computer wakes from sleep, KM runs fine for a few minutes and then completely hangs so that no functions (macros, switcher etc) work. At that point, when I mouse over the KM icon in the menu bar it shows a spinning beach ball, and in Activity Monitor it shows that Keyboard Maestro Engine is not responding and in red.
If I force quit the KM engine and then re-launch it, it once again runs fine for a few seconds to minutes, then hangs again. This happens even if I don’t do anything else - i.e. not typing, not launching any macros that I’m aware of, etc.
The only way to get it to work normally again is to reboot the computer, at which point it runs fine indefinitely until the computer sleeps and wakes.
So what I’ve been doing is having to reboot the computer after waking from sleep each time, in order to have KM function properly.
There are no messages in the Console suggesting that anything unusual is going on at the time it hangs; I also tried running the debugger and there’s nothing unusual happening there either (not sure I’m using the debugger correctly though).
This never occurred prior to Yosemite - everything ran fine on Lion, ML, Mavericks, etc.
Any thoughts? Thanks in advance!
A
MacBook Air (Mid-2011) Core i7 1.8 GHz
Yosemite 10.10.1
Keyboard Maestro 6.4.7
If Keyboard Maestro Engine (or any application really) freezes, in the Activity Monitor, get a Sample of the frozen process and send it to the developer. Email it to me and I’ll take a look and see what Keyboard Maestro is doing when it is frozen.
Well, needless to say, after occurring daily since upgrading to Yosemite, it’s no longer happening now that I’ve posted in this forum.
I’ll email a sample of the frozen process if/when it occurs again. Thanks for responding!
A
I have EXACTLY the same issue. So I will post in this forum, because this seems to solve the problem 
I will mail the analysis of the activity monitor, if that helps.
Thanks for help in advance!
Oliver Henkel
MacBook Air (Mid-2013) Core i5 1.3 GHz
Yosemite 10.10.1
Keyboard Maestro 6.4.7
It seems to happen when Keyboard Maestro Engine is checking for internet reachability to do the version check. I’m not sure why it is happening on only a few Macs, presumably it relates to DNS caching or the like.
A possible hack solution would be to edit your /etc/hosts file and add the line:
174.143.153.230 www.stairways.com
Its not ideal in case I ever move my server, but it would likely resolve the problem if you are being troubled by it on an ongoing basis.
It started happening again for me too, and unfortunately adding that line to the hosts file didn’t help.
The strange thing is that Keyboard Maestro Engine runs fine from a Mac restart, and does so indefinitely … UNTIL the computer goes to sleep and wakes up, after which it will hang within a minute or so, and keep doing so every time it’s force quit / relaunched.
I do appreciate the rapid replies and continued assistance - for now I’m just rebooting after waking from sleep or just preventing the laptop from sleeping at all when possible as KM is absolutely indispensable!
OK, it is becoming clear that this hang is yet another bug in Yosemite. But that said the way Keyboard Maestro checks for reachability is not ideal because it can lock up (it never has in the past, and based on the above, I suspect the lock up now has more to do with Yosemite bugs than with DNS issues). In any event, since I have decided I have to do a 6.4.8 release with a bunch of Yosemite bug workarounds, so I added a fix for this (presuming that the problem is fixable in Yosemite and not a deeper bug). If you would like to try the beta, send me an PM or email me.
I had a report from a user previously who had this problem and determined that it was related to errors on his hard disk, which he has since corrected with DiskWarrior which he is now running weekly. Whether this is related or not, I have no idea, but it would certainly be worth running a Disk Utility scan of your hard disk just to make sure.
Just wanted to report that the issue of KM Engine hanging hasn’t occurred at all since upgrading to the new 6.4.8 release … thank you so much!!
1 Like
A follow-up to the above thread … so it turns out that the fundamental problem was that, for some reason, discoveryd was not properly starting or running after wake from sleep.
Even though the Keyboard Maestro issue was completely solved after the new 6.4.8 version was released, I was noticing that other apps were having various network connection problems as well, and after some research, found that reloading discoveryd (using sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.discoveryd.plist ) caused all of these other issues to resolve immediately.
Anyway just wanted to share that in case that’s useful info for anyone out there.
Thanks again!
Yes, I suspected it was something like that in Yosemite. Because while Keyboard Maestro should not have relied on the reachability API answering promptly (and no longer does), the flip side is that there was no good reason that the reachability API shouldn’t have answered promptly in these cases, and certainly not for long periods of time. Chalk it up to yet another Yosemite bug.