What is com.apple.IconServicesAgent?

I have the same problem.

Mine is using 99% Cpu and around 200 MB Ram!

been like this for the past three hours

Thanks

MacBook Pro, OS X Mavericks (10.9)

Hi,

Like others, I too quickly installed Mavericks over Mountain Lion. I also faced high memory usage by kernel_task (over 600MB) and com.apple.IconServicesAgent (over 150MB).

In my case, I noticed that I had installed Tinkertool which had started a kernel task com.bresink.driver.BRESINKx86Monitoring. As per advise of others, I unloaded it using kextunload command and removed it from Library/StartupItems

I also went to system preferences and in users and groups, I unchecked ItunesHelper from autoload.

I shutdown the system and restarted it. Now, my Kernel task is using 490 MB and com.apple.iconservicesagent only 30MB. Screenshot attached. As you can see I am running activity monitor, google chrome, safari and mail.

Perhaps your systems may be running some kernel tasks do kextstat | grep -v apple to check. I also suggest you to uncheck some start up items from Users &Groups in System preferences and see if you have luck.

Thanks

S V Sudharshan

I had this problem and solved it by creating an Automator Script that kills the process at startup, it then comes back again, but instead of the 350mb of RAM usage it takes only 40 ~ 70 mb, not perfect, but good enough 🙂

The Applescript would be:

do shell script "killall -9 com.apple.IconServicesAgent"

and the bash command would be:

sh -c 'killall -9 com.apple.IconServicesAgent'

I kill this **** process every hour with a LaunchControl task.

AZPublishing wrote:

@Magnat What a Great idea for the Apple script.....any chance you can post the applescript code you wrote to do this? I'd love to try it myself.

Open Macintosh HD then click Users and Your Home Folder then after *hold down Command and press together the two keys Shift and . (period key). You should see secret folders that Apple hides for a cleaner look. If you don't then try rapidly pressing the Shift key and period key while holding down Command. You should now see a folder containers. Click the folder containers. This is where the com. folders should be. That is what I know.

*For some Mac Users this doesn't work. If you're one of them open Terminal and type defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles YES close Terminal and relaunch Finder now the secret folders should be visible. To hide them again type defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles NO. Ten relaunch finder again and the secret folders should be hidden again.

Same. I actually have two copies running, one at about 300 MB, the other at 200. Kernel_task is around a gig.

Now I'd seen a post elsewhere (http://67.227.255.239/forum/showthread.php?p=87072616) suggesting that they'll get smaller when 'memory compression' is fully active … but I don't know what that means, and it's been since, what, yesterday…

Found this thread through a Google search, as my com.apple.iconservicesagent was also going nuts in the same way as described. I don't know exactly why it was doing so, but I did have an interesting observation.

Several hours ago, I tried to use the drag-and-drop method of creating an alias -- I was trying to make an alias of this file to the desktop:

/System/Library/CoreServices/Applications/Network Utility.app

When I tried, nothing appeared to happen. So I drag-and-dropped again. Still nothing. I figured it was a 10.9 bug and decided to move on to other things, including being away from my computer for several hours. When I returned, I found my MacBook Air fans on high rotation. I checked the Activity Monitor and found this process had 3 hours of CPU time, and was running at something like 98%. I killed it -- and the moment I did, two aliases to Network Utility appeared on my desktop!

Still not sure why it happened, but there appears to be a direct connection between the two events.

I discovered it's some app start on login related...

probably all of us had upgraded OS X Maverick, not a clean installed one.

Can you confirm us?

The IconServicesAgent is now using only 21.4MB of memory after I disabled some apps from "Login Itens"

- KeyRemap4MacBook

- Moon

I opened both apps now and the resources is the same 21.4MB, without changes.

##### TESTED

Yes, it works for me.

Go to Preferences > Users & Groups > Login Itens

Note and disable some apps: select with cursor and click on "-"

Reboot and look at Activity Monitor if the procedure was successful.

Open the app you disabled from startup and look if it changes the memory/cpu usage.

Nope, I did a clean install of 10.9 -- erased the whole hard drive, reinstalled everything from scratch. I have nothing particularly odd in my login items -- iTunes Helper, Messages, Twitterific and SMARTReporter.

Aside from the one time I reported earlier, I haven't seen this problem since. In case at least, I'm pretty sure it was connected to my drag-and-drop alias creation.

Nonononononono.

This is not Windows. We do not format and reinstall when we upgrade, or when a program seems to be having trouble running all of a sudden.

This is peculiar behavior. How peculiar? My X.9 install was atop my X.8, which was migrated from a Mini running X.7, which had X.6 upgraded from it, which was X.5 before that on an even older Mini, migrated from an iBook G3 that had X.4 all the way down to X.2. (Seriously. I have passwords in my keychain to Web sites I haven't visited in more than half a decade.)

This is a very, very old legacy-install machine that's been effectively running the same OS, more or less contiguously, since 2004 or so, with very solid reliability — even when the processor architecture was Motorola based, not Intel — and I've never had a serious problem with migration or updates, certainly not so serious that I've ever had to format and reinstall. I have never had to format and reinstall, in nearly ten years.

(This is why I like both Mac and UNIX, which are basically the same at their core; they are rock solid, better than 90% of the time, in my experience.)

No. X.9 has a problem that's been introduced with com.apple.IconServicesAgent. It should not be occupying a quarter gig of RAM, and should not be spawned in more than one process under any circumstance — it's apparently a core system process, not a user-executed series of instances.

If I had to guess — actually, I do have to guess — I'd suppose the process is involved entirely in loading icon previews and drawing them to screen. I've a feeling, if that's the case, that it's trying to cache all icon data from all apps and files everywhere on the hard drive at once, on the off chance that any one random icon might have to render to screen. But of course it doesn't have to do that, since the odds that you'll want all icons showing at once are zero. (There are typically a quarter of a million files on a clean OSX install with your basic suite of Apple apps on top of that; that is a lot of files with a lot of icons.)

My surmise is that someone overlooked that one thing; someone failed to notice that it's trying to keep a live cache of all icons simultaneously. I think we'll be seeing a change in its behavior with X.9.0.1 or thereabouts.

Anyway. If anyone from Apple (or any third-party company, such as @dobe) suggests — in any troubleshooting context — that you should make a new user account, or format and reinstall, feel free to laugh at them and tell them to turn to Page Two of their 'user problem tech support script' book. This is the 21st century. We do not format and reinstall. We deal with the problem by finding it and killing it, always nondestructively to user data.

I discovered one interesting thing now...

Open Finder and look the memory usage growing more and more when you view files as Cover Flow.

Open Application folder on Cover Flow...my Memory usage is +150MB now

I closed Finder window but the memory usage don't fall 😮

Having the same problem with growing size of com.apple.IconServicesAgen. Also Console is repeating this message over and over again:

10/29/13 9:19:29.572 AM com.apple.IconServicesAgent[231]: Icon filename entry missing from bundle info dictionary for bundle at URL: file:///System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/WebKit2.framework/Versions/A/XPCServic es/com.apple.WebKit.WebContent.xpc/

Is there anything I can do to fix this?

I noticed that iconServicesAgent begins to consume more memory when you open finder and navigate to many folders. As a trial, open up activity monitor and then finder and keep navigating to many folders one by one while watching how the memory consumption increases... at least in my case that is what is happening. If others too experience the same, at least we can know something.

My Console error messages are back and iconServicesAgent is 149 MB.

10/31/13 10:42:48.526 AM com.apple.IconServicesAgent[228]: Icon filename entry missing from bundle info dictionary for bundle at URL: file:///System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/WebKit2.framework/Versions/A/XPCServic es/com.apple.WebKit.WebContent.xpc/

So nothing seems fixed here and issues persist.

I had this problem too, and when trying to repair disc permissions, I got all these ACL-errors. When searching for a solution for that problem, I found something called ACLr8 on the web. Downloaded it and ran it.

My com.apple.iconservicesagent process is now using 12.4 MB of RAM, instead of over 200 MB of RAM.

I do not know if this can help you, and I want to make clear that using that little commandline is on your own risk!

For me, it helped though 🙂