iconservicesmanager seemingly can't recognize DEFAULT icons in external drives. I'm not talking about custom, manufactured icons. I don't have the time or interest in making them or altering the common OS system of assigning icons to files. iconservicesagent eats up nearly all of my RAM (16g) and freezes the Finder.
So iconservicesagent is not working correctly.
On my mac, it is using just around 30MB of RAM.
You may try clearing the icon cache, as it may have become corrupted.
You may copy the command below (a very long line) and paste into a Terminal window.
After about 10 days of obsessive focusing on this issue, I called Apple Support. And guess what? It appears as if they have an answer. Now, I've tried lots of Terminal command lines and rebooting and safe moding and cleaning external hard drives, and I thought that the problem was virtually insolvable. But lo and behold, the support folks at Apple may have given me the answer to all of the frustrations: not being able to transfer large video files from one storage volume to another, whether it's the home volume or not. What the support supervisor did was guided me through a short sequence of actions to repair disk permissions. That seemed to solve the issue. I previously read that, when Apple did away with the disk permissions repair function in Disk Utilities, it was because they incorporated repairing disk permissions during startup. But the support folks told me otherwise, and that every once in a while, disk permissions need to be repaired through the "Get Info" box of the home folder, and a short command line that gets pasted into the Terminal (diskutil resetUserPermissions / `id -u`). That's what I did, and it looks like it's what I needed.
Thank you for your assistance in this matter. You were part of the process that led me to an apparent solution.
Please run Etrecheck and post its report here. There may be some other software conflict that is causing this.
Thanks. I'll give it a try, and reply when I get results.
Luis, thanks for your advice, but your fix was temporary. The RAM pressure really calmed down after I pasted the command, but as soon as I began to work with files that had icon issues, or with volumes on which there were icon issues, it all started again. Right now, one of my external drives doesn't even have an icon on the desktop. And the drives I'm using (after wiping them, reformatting, and restoring files) have files with blank icons when there were app-linked icons before. This is nuts.
Any other steps?
iconservicesagent is causing problems with the Finder and the OS
