What is com.apple.IconServicesAgent?

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 😮

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

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?

• Reboot
• Keep pressing ⌘+R (recover mode)
• Disk Utility
• Repair Disk Permissions

This did the trick for me.

Thanks Phaistonian - this fixed it for me too.

The Phaistonian fix stopped my Console error messages, but com.apple.IconServicesAgent is still running, currently using

116.3 MB of memory. Doesnt seem to ever stop running.

Hi sorry for my English, I have the same problem! i change The default browser to Google Chrome and the prosses down to 0.5 % CPU!!

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 🙂

Running permission repair on my system results in a couple of printer permission changes and nothing else, so I would be reluctant to run an ACL command line fix in Terminal.

I had killed iconServicesAgent a few hours ago, but it is back running and growing and up to 92.5 MB now.

TIA.

Somewhere in the thread it was recommended to boot into Recovery mode (boot and hold CMD-R) and run disk utilities to repair permissions. This seems help!

As some have mentioned, only a couple of things needed repairing (some print services for me) and then nothing else. Still, the iconServicesAgent continued to take about 150mb RAM. I repeated the recovery mode repair permissions 2 or 3 times. Now iconServicesAgent only takes 3mb RAM.

I've also noticed that the Kernel Task that was taking upward of 700mb RAB, is consistently down below 500mb RAM. Still far too high, but at least it's better...

try repairing permissions and restarting a few times and hopefully it helps flush whatever is caushing issues.

Disk repair is always a good thing to do regularly in any case - once a month or so jsut to confirm things are working correctly. However, running a permission repair several times in a row won't accomplish anything. Once is sufficient.

com.apple.IconServicesAgent will settle down after a while, it seems, once it's finished caching all your documents. My surmise is that those who are seeing a substantial reduction in its RAM usage have reached the threshold where it becomes a more polite process., and that it has little to do with repeated disk maintenance operations.

I upgraded on release day. the iconServicesAgent has been close to 200mb since install and didn't fall to 1-2mb until after I had executed the process I described. Completely possible that the timing was just coincidental.

I agree, running multiple times shouldn't make a difference. But if it seems to help if I hop on my left foot when it runs, I'll do it. 🙂