Unity on mac: stutters on entering play mode, even in a blank project...

Unity Engine
1

Hi guys

I’m at my wits end on this one… Whenever I click play in the unity editor, after around 15 seconds my system will hang intermittently for milliseconds to seconds every 2-5 seconds. My mouse movement during the brief pause is exaggerated after the pause so it causes the mouse to shoot around the screen semi-randomly. I’m using a 2016 macbook pro running Sierra 10.12.4.

After much troubleshooting on my own projects, I’ve reached the following point:

A brand new Unity install with a brand new project, with absolutely no assets, no saved scenes, nothing, still has this problem for me. I thought maybe a Unity update would help, so I just installed the newest Unity(5.5.something to 2017.1.0f3), went → New project → clicked play, waited 10 seconds, and the problem started again. I guess it’s a good thing it’s not related to my project, but still…

It makes play testing on my mac frustrating at the best of times and impossible at the worst of times.

The profiler shows spikes during the pauses, but they are never the same process causing the problem, so whatever is causing the problem, is causing any random process that’s being handled at that point in time to spike.

CPU usage on my mac during the period is < 80, memory usage is < 80. No activity monitor processes spike during the period. Rebooting and immediately loading unity with plenty of available system resources and a blank project doesn’t help.

I don’t know what else to do other than try a format reload and then throw this mac in the trash.

Does anyone have any ideas what I can try to do to resolve this, maybe someone has seen this before?

2

Just throwing out ideas. First, most obvious, did you restart? Did this just start recently? Was it running fine before this version? Try installing an earlier version of Unity, or a patch version (Download Archive) to see if the problem still exists. Is there any kind of hardware connected that might be interfering with Unity? Any other 3d applications running in the background? Do you have enough RAM and/or harddrive space?

I used Unity on Mac a lot but can’t think of having this particular issue. Initially I thought it might’ve been a case of having to clear your project Library folder but you created new projects.

3

Appreciate the response. So the time this started happening is a blur because I have taken some long breaks on my project, but its been at least a couple of months, it’s also been mingled in between some legitimate performance problems on my game which I’ve long since resolved which makes it hard to tell exactly when it started.

I’m also sure it’s not a resource issue exclusively because a fresh reboot jumping into a brand new project still presents the issue, plenty of resources available to run a blank scene and I haven’t had this problem since the start on this Mac. I’m thinking it my have started when I upgraded macOS from El capitan to Sierra. It does seem less severe the more external applications are closed/fresher the reboot, so it seems tied to resources but not completely due to a lack of it…

I think I’m just going to end up gritting my teeth until I can hopefully soon sell my Mac and move to a normal, beefier laptop. So over this thing.