com.apple.powerchime (launchd) fails and crashes MBA

[Ratsima]

I have a condo that I visit a five or six days each month. At the condo I have an old MBA (10.13.6) that performs a variety of tasks and runs 24/7 whether I'm there or not.

A couple of days after I left last time I was unable to reach the machine remotely, so I was anxious to see what the logs showed.

When I arrived a few days ago the logs were remarkably uninformative except that the following line was repeated over 850 times just before the machine became unresponsive:

com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.powerchime): Service only ran for 0 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 10 seconds.

(All this does is control whether or not the power chime is enabled.)

Anyone have any idea why this would run 850 times and then cause the machine to grind to a halt?

I just checked the current system log and com.apple.powerchime doesn't appear at all.

 

[Raz0rEdge]

I assume you have the MBA plugged in all the time and powerchime doesn't control the chime, but rather chimes when the charger is plugged in. Since this is a unattended Mac, you might want to disable that functionality so that it doesn't start to chime for no reason.

Open a Terminal window and type the following

sudo defaults write com.apple.PowerChime ChimeOnAllHardware -bool false

You will be prompted for your password, enter it for the command to succeed.

Once that is done, kill powerchime if it is running with

sudo killall PowerChime

You might or might not need to enter your password depending on how quickly you type the two command back to back.

While annoying, the respawning of this application shouldn't have made the MBA unresponsive though.

 

[Ratsima]

Although the MBA is connected to power all the time I have it set to restart shortly after midnight every day. It chimes on restart. I agree that the respawn shouldn’t have made it MBA unresponsive. But, the last log entry on October 16 was the respawn. The next log entry was when I rebooted it on November 22. When I got there in the 22nd the fan was running like crazy, but the screen was blank and it was otherwise unresponsive.

 

[Raz0rEdge]

The chime on start is unrelated to the PowerChime application which only chimes when the charger is plugged in.

 

[MacInWin]

Could there have been a power failure? When the power returned, the chime would trigger just as if it were plugged in at that time.

 

[Ratsima]

I guess we've never owned a machine with PowerChime which is why I don't know anything about it.

The subject machine is a 2009 MBA with a MagSafe power connector. I don't think it has PowerChime:

Axe:~ mnewman$ sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/PowerChime.app/Contents/MacOS/PowerChime
Password:
2019-11-24 13:05:53.801 PowerChime[9000:205343] PowerChime: ========= powerchime starting =============
2019-11-24 13:05:53.810 PowerChime[9000:205343] PowerChime: PowerChime: chime enabled by hardware: 0
2019-11-24 13:05:53.810 PowerChime[9000:205343] PowerChime: PowerChime disabled - ChimeOnNoHardware default: 0

So, why did the application get respawned until the machine crashed?