Clipboard paste hangs application for 30s

Question

I'm on MacOS Catalina 10.15.3 (Darwin 19.3.0). My Mac frequently gets into a state where every attempt to paste from the system clipboard freezes the application I'm pasting in to for about 30s, meaning I see a "beachball" when hovering over that application, but can still use other applications.

It also happens with pbcopy/pbpaste:

echo foo | pbcopy
time pbpaste

real 0m30.031s
user 0m0.226s
sys  0m0.202s

It takes almost exactly 30s every time. Note that there is also no output from pbpaste.

I can temporarily resolve it by running rm ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist && killall Finder, but the issue returns within minutes. Rebooting does not help.

How can I resolve this?

Try booting into Safe Mode (Hold Shift while booting) and see if the problem persists. — Allan, Feb 21 '20 at 14:08
The issue appeared on the new user account after about a day of use — rcorre, Feb 25 '20 at 14:33
I have the same issue (https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/383624/pboard-making-mojave-slow-closing-down-apps) and nobody seem to know what to do — user1256923, Apr 20 '20 at 05:53
Are you using Handoff / Universal Clipboard with your iPhone? I have noticed a sometimes significant lag. https://superuser.com/questions/1124352/how-to-disable-universal-clipboard — pkamb, Feb 09 '21 at 21:52
Anyone found any solution? This is very annoying. Core functionality is not working fine!!! — vijayinani, Jan 21 '23 at 14:36

score 4 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 21 '20 at 14:16

4

Open the Terminal application, found in /Applications/Utilities/
Type the following command exactly:
```
killall pboard
```
Hit Return

This will terminate and relaunch the pboard process, which is the clipboard daemon for Mac OS. This should resolve your issue.

answered Feb 21 '20 at 14:16

Udhy

6,697

Thanks, but I already tried killing pboard and it doesn't seem to help. – rcorre Feb 21 '20 at 18:09
Actually, killing pboard does stop paste from freezing, if only because it clears the clipboard. However, the freezes return as soon as I copy something again. – rcorre Feb 25 '20 at 14:34

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited Feb 12 '21 at 19:20

Let’s try to understand what the system is doing during the hang:

Run the following command to enable kernel symbolication: sudo nvram boot-args="keepsyms=1"
Reboot your machine and don’t open any apps except for Terminal.
In one Terminal window, run your pbpaste invocation.
In a second Terminal window, run the following, making sure you’re only running it during the window of time that pbpaste is hung: sudo spindump -reveal -noProcessingWhileSampling
After waiting for 10 seconds to collect a sample and another minute or two to symbolicate and format, you’ll get a file in /tmp/spindump.txt that contains a stackshot of every process.
Upload the file to PasteBin or some equivalent place and we can take a look to see what pbpaste is blocked on.

Thanks for the comment! Unfortunately I ended up reimaging my entire system to fix it. So far it hasn't come back. — rcorre, Feb 09 '21 at 21:28

score 0 · Answer 3 · edited Oct 10 '22 at 09:45

0

Press Option ⌥+5.

Worked for me.

Ref. - https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/139334/445040

edited Oct 10 '22 at 09:45

agarza

2,274

answered Oct 10 '22 at 02:55

vijayinani

101
2

1

Hello, vijayinani. This is considered a "link-only" answer. It would be helpful for future visitors to this question if you would [edit] in a summary of that page. Links can become broken or outdated so a summary would still provide the necessary information. – agarza Oct 10 '22 at 04:14

Clipboard paste hangs application for 30s

3 Answers3