Q: Memory leak on W7 x64 Post iOS9 upgrades iCloudServices.exe

OK, solved the problem. It needs the forced taskkill switch added to the command.

So it is: taskkill /im icloudservices.exe /f

Being new to this command, I wondered if you had to specify a path to the file, but testing this showed that it finds that itself.

I've put this command in a batch (.bat) file (called it taskkill icloudservices.bat) and set up a schedule to run every hour. This still allows Outlook to load icloudservices by itself, but restricts it to not growing to more than about 70Mb. Whilst it is not loaded/killed, Outlook continues to sync, so all good here. (it must have a resident (TSR) copy of it).

Not sure if not running icloudservices.exe affects syncing of photos - not tested that yet. If you need access to the iCloud control pane at any time, you can load it manually from the Program List. The kill task will kill it on the hour, so all good again.

If you would like me to post my Scheduler settings, let me know and I'll post a few screen shots.

Until Apple fix this issue, this is probably one of the simplest automated ways of preventing icloudservices.exe from growing without limit. If you don't mind it growing up to 1Gb, you could probably get away by just killing it once a day. There is a switch that lets you nominate the max size the file can grow to before killing it, but I could not get that to work.

Yes, I agree. Just the uncertainty here with the file being called iCloudservices, suggesting that it could have function(s) affecting or being required by other i services.

The silence from anybody involved with the product development team at Apple, on this thread, speaks volumes about how much they are listening, here.

If the issue has no direct impact or threat to their bottom line (i.e. We all sit and chat about ways of working round the memory leak bug) then Apple are not going to do anything to fix it. Business basics. They will not fix it, until enough people complain and call Apple support or open online support requests. By all means continue your chatting in this forum, but also make sure this registers on Apple's radar through their support channel.

By the way, is this problem also apparent on Windows 10, 32 or 64 bit?

It's certainly an issue on Windows 8.1 x64. Will be testing Windows 10 x64 shortly.

Sorry if I didn't make myself clear here why I asked the question. The reason I asked was if iCloudservices in Windows 10 does work normally, Apple will most likely never do anything to fix it for prior Windows versions.

Hi Philip, Considering the latest reports suggest Windows 10 is still only on one in ten PCs I don't think even Apple will be able to get away with fixing it for only Windows 10. To stand a chance of maintaining market share for the PC platform they will have to fix it for everything for Windows 7 and later. Also, considering the heavily shared codebase that still exists between these platforms it cannot be beyond got their capabilities.

Deejerydoo - never underestimate the jaw dropping surprise decisions that such companies can make.

I was once told by Microsoft support that as it works in Firefox, ... Microsoft had made a change to IE they were not going to reverse. They still haven't after 14 years. There will be some underlying reasoning they don't want to share.

OK. Results are in. I have tested this on a first time installation of iCloud onto a reasonably freshly installed Windows 10 system and can confirm there appears to be a memory leak in iCloudServices.exe of about 30K for every minute the executable is running. So this is fairly conclusive that there is a memory leak bug in iCloudServices.exe that will, given enough time cause your system to run out of memory resources and need to be restarted.

I've opened a support case with Apple, who have escalated it to the product team to see if they are aware of the issue, as the support rep was not able to find any details for a known memory leak issue.

Gosh... I'm on Win7 x64 having same issue.  My PC is so much quieter after I killed icloudservices.exe!  Was using mem and cpu big time.

Tired of waiting for apple's response, just uninstalled it. Average rate of 1.5 GB of memory consumed by icloudservice.exe process on Windows 7 x64.

I have the same problem on Windows 7.  If I bounce icloudservices it starts back at 42,268k and in grow to way over 250 crippling my system. 

You brought up a good point - I don't think I started seeing this memory creep until I enabled photo sharing; now that it's disabled it will be interesting to see if the memory allocation continues its wild growth.

My photo sharing was disabled, and I still had the problem..

You are right - in the couple of hours the working size of icloud has DOUBLED in size to 96,176K.

Does anyone have any other suggestions or does anyone know if Apple is looking into this problem?