Waking up a Mac

Lately I’ve been having an occasional problem waking up my Mac. It’s a Mac Pro, OS Mavericks, 16GB memory, both computer sleep and display sleep set at 15 minutes. Usually wakes up fine, but sometimes if it’s been asleep for several hours I have to shut it off and restart. I don’t think I had this problem before installing Mavericks (no surprise). What’s causing this?

Thanks.

How do you wake it up?
You now have to press a key, or click the mouse…

When I bought my MacBookPro, the Apple person said just close the lid when you have finished. If you are not using it for 3 or more days do a shut down. Works for me.

Well, there’s no lid to close on a Mac Pro.

I turn on the monitor, press a key and click the mouse . . . sometimes repeatedly, with cursing.

What does the power light do during all of these frustrating actions?

New Mac Pro or older Mac Pro?

He said he upgraded to Mavericks, so it has to be an older one (the brand-new ones shipped with Mavericks).

I believe there was a fix for this in 10.9.2. Have you updated?

The Mac is less than 1.5 years old. I recently installed Mavericks, which is 10.9.2. During all of this the power light remains lit. The strange thing is that the problem doesn’t exist every time I wake it up. I haven’t been able to isolate the circumstances when the problem does/doesn’t exist.

I the power light is ON, the machine never went to sleep.
When it’s asleep, the power light will “snore.”

So, it sounds like the machine is crashing when it tries to sleep - I would start checking the Console logs and see if you can identify what’s causing the crash (usually some marginally incompatible extension).