MacOS – My 2,5 year old Macbook Pro wakes from sleep every other hour after installing Mavericks

macbook promacossleep-wake

Okay so, I own a 2,5 year old (Early 2011) Macbook Pro which works just fine. After the release of Mavericks I decided to reinstall it from scratch since I had been upgrading it step-by-step since Snow Leopard and it would feel good to reinstall it from scratch.

Well, I did that a while back ago, and only yesterday did I remember that I had forgotten to install an IRC client. So, I installed Limechat which is what I normally use. Well, today at work, I realized that my computer at home was logging in to IRC every other hour just to get a ping timeout 3 minutes later. Hm, that's weird.

So, when I come home I find this every other hour in /var/log/system.log (example has been cut for brevity):

Nov  5 14:30:50 pioneer kernel[0]: AirPort_Brcm43xx::powerChange: System Wake - Full Wake/ Dark Wake / Maintenance wake
Nov  5 14:30:50 pioneer kernel[0]: Previous Sleep Cause: 5
Nov  5 14:30:50 pioneer WindowServer[126]: _CGXHWCaptureWindowList: No capable active display found.
Nov  5 14:30:50 pioneer kernel[0]: wlEvent: en1 en1 Link DOWN virtIf = 0
Nov  5 14:30:50 pioneer kernel[0]: AirPort: Link Down on en1. Reason 8 (Disassociated because station leaving).
Nov  5 14:30:50 pioneer UserEventAgent[11]: Captive: CNPluginHandler en1: Inactive
...

At first I thought it was this new (?) feature called Power Nap, but it turns out that my Mac doesn't support that. So I figure it must either be something on my LAN that is waking it up through the wake-on-LAN mechanism, or something that runs locally on my Mac.

What do you guys think it could be?

Best Answer

Possibly you have a "Wake for network access" on in Power Saver preferences. This is a feature that works if you use "Find My Mac" feature with iCloud. Check that.