Freezing appears to be back

Bugs or Unexpected Behavior
1

Describe the bug
This bug appears to be back: Random freezing of mouse & keyboard input for around 5 seconds (even happened as I wrote this description). The other linked bugs have better descriptions, but it is essentially random input freezes. It went away for almost a year or so, but now it's back.

Affected input device (e.g. MacBook Trackpad, Magic Mouse/Trackpad, Touch Bar, etc.):
MacBook Pro Trackpad / Mouse / all input.

Device information:

  • Type of Mac: MacBook Pro
  • macOS version: 10.14.2
  • BetterTouchTool version: 2.714 (1023) - latest as of this writing

Additional information (e.g. StackTraces, related issues, screenshots, workarounds, etc.):
Other bugs this is directly related to:

2

I was experiencing the random freezing as well on my 2017 iMac in macOS 10.14.3 with BTT 2.714 but I followed the advice of someone else in a previous thread and unchecked a key I had checked in

Mouse > General > Change Mouse Speed While Holding

and so far haven't experienced any additional freezing. The general consensus in the thread from last year was that the freezing was somehow related to mouse speed settings.

Thanks for restoring the functionality of the standard Set Mouse Speed setting by the way.

3

Thanks, although I don't have any of those particular settings checked.

4

Well, I just experienced a freeze WITHOUT BTT running for the first time... I guess it is safe to say that the freezes are not because of BTT. Sorry! You can delete this thread.

5

this is still a bug in macOS unfortunately. Some IOKit related APIs seem to trigger the freezes. It can potentially be triggered by any app that uses these APIs (BTT however shouldn't use them anymore, unless I haven't identified all of them)

6

Thanks, Andreas. Yes, there are a lot of reports of freezes like I'm experiencing out there on the net. At one point last year there were many reports posted and over 15,000 "I also have this problem" upvotes of them on Apple's own forums of this very issue. Apple has since scrubbed all of them from the internet. It seems something fishy is going on, Apple obviously knows what it is but they've refused to comment in every single instance.

I finally contacted Apple support on the phone and spoke to a rep and, after contacting engineering, he emailed me telling me to boot into Recovery Mode and run the following command in Terminal, which I did:

nvram 8be4df61-93ca-11d2-aa0d-00e098032b8c:epid_provisioned=%01%00%00%00

Interestingly, in the email he copied and pasted from engineering to me, it included the final step, which read,
"The HDCP content should play back normally" - obviously provided by engineers, because the rep hadn't said anything regarding "HDCP".

This would seem to indicate that it could be a "High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection" playback related bug. I'm running Safari most of the time and usually streaming Youtube audio, so I started to think this might be the culprit. After running the above command in Oct of last year (2018), I got one more freeze that same day but then no more until about two weeks ago.

(Same solution also posted here, which I've since found:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/mbp-13-2018-safari-stutter-glitch-freeze-can-someone-please-test.2129323/page-2#post-26381208 )

If I had to guess I want to say that it might have to do with having lots of Safari windows and tabs open (bad habit of mine) and playing video content (sports streams, Netflix, streaming YT audio, etc).

Anyway, hope this helps in case anyone else runs in to this issue thinking it is BTT. I'm still enjoying BTT and use it all the time. Thanks again!