What is com.apple.IconServicesAgent?

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. 🙂

What's funny is that one of my machines settled down after several days - and then lost power to an external HD, which resulted in a dirty unmount. When I fixed the problem, the IconServicesAgent went back to its old tricks. I actually had to reboot on that one; none of the documents on the external drive were recognizable to their parent apps. (PDFs wouldn't load, for instance, with Finder reporting that it couldn't find Acrobat.)

I think there has to be a connection there.

com.apple.IconServicesAgent is clearly doing something, but the CPU load it's using - very low - is vastly out of proportion to its RAM usage, I think. I mean I'd expect a system process taking up that much space - presumably doing some kind of indexing, caching, or databasing a la Spotlight - to be occupying more cycles as well.

com.apple.IconServicesAgent is writing icon bitmap files to /var/folders/* (in my case, /var/folders/wc/[hash]/C/*. It seems to be creating folders for each registered application, and populating those folders with icon images. If you have something wrong with permissions in your /var/folders/ directory, or IconServicesAgent has issues reading icons from one or more of your registered apps/bundles, you'll likely experience issues.

However, it appears to be caching a LOT of icon info in memory as well; mine is currently sitting at around 300MB. Not too worrying, as the priority seems to be pretty low (meaning most of the data will be swapped out to disk if some other process needs memory), but it's doing a LOT of work.

In Activity Monitor, checking the Open Files and Ports tab, I see that it's STILL crawling through all my files -- partly because I've been either upgrading the OS or migrating my computer since 1988, so I've still got reams of Classic apps with resource forks -- and this Agent is going through EVERY resource fork grabbing the icons (even on software that this computer cannot run or actively display the icons of).

For open files, other than the ones it's reading icons out of, it also has these open:

/

/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/IconServices.framework/Versions/A/XPCServices/ com.apple.IconServicesAgent.xpc/Contents/MacOS/com.apple.IconServicesAgent

/System/Library/ColorSync/Profiles/sRGB Profile.icc

/private/var/folders/wc/0bq4qh0s1gv8thhxr7c77wjm0000gn/C/com.apple.IconServices/ ISCacheTOC

/private/var/folders/wc/0bq4qh0s1gv8thhxr7c77wjm0000gn/C/com.apple.LaunchService s-044501.csstore

/usr/lib/dyld

/private/var/db/dyld/dyld_shared_cache_x86_64

/dev/null

/dev/null

/dev/null

count=2, state=0x2

I could give more info if people are interested, but it appears that Apple needs to do a bit of tuning on this new caching mechanism -- hopefully that'll show up in the next point version.

This seems very similar to the new preferences caching feature -- and it's a really good idea, as any fiddling around or power interruptions etc. will only affect the cached items, which will then be reloaded and optimized (for display speed).

I had the same problem and did a Relaunch Finder (from the Force Quit item in the Apple menu). After that everything seems to work fine at least for the last hour.

(Also the repeating error message from this process in the Console have stopped after the Finder relaunch)

Hi,

As well as the rest of you, I am noticing this process consuming a large amount of RAM. After installing Mavericks, I have also noticed an intermittent cursor problem, but only in Apple Mail and Evernote. After hovering the cursor over text, where it changes to an i-beam, it then stays as an i-beam even when I move up to finder menus where it should change back to a pointer. It's intermittent and then behaves but I keep getting the feeling it has something to do with the processor being occupied elsewhere, perhaps related to the problem discussed here of com.apple.IconServicesAgent.

Has anyone else had a similar cursor problem and do you think it is related?

Kim

I have experienced some weird behaviour with the pointer too.

All in all, Mavericks seems a bit "buggy" at times. Still like it, but som performance fixes would be appreciated.

Hard to tell if the icon.services-process has anuthing to do with it though.

Hey guys, like others have said, Google brought me here.

I am using a MBP 4.1 with 10.9 recently installed on an update, not a reformat. Pretty much the same as everyone else, noticed on iStat that there was a constant pull from somewhere, looked in Activity Monitor to find iconServicesAgent at the top. Just thought I would voice that this is happening on my system too.

iStat Pro says that my AirPort "Updating..." and I notice a spike on the Airport monitor every 30 seconds. Maybe a corelation?

iconServicesAgent is at a steady 460Mb with file cache at 1.66Gb. Usage also increases as I open folders, most noticably Applications folder.

...and on my mini (16 gigs of ram), the I heard spinning or fan noise blah, blah, blah with activity monitor showing the com.app.iconservicesAgent using upward of 190% of CPU this morning right after I loaded up Excel; everything was fine / quiet up until then///// the spinning drive / fan noise or what ever it is continued until I closed Excel at which time the noise (I'm thinking fan) got quieter and quieter till I no longer heard it.

Com.app.iconservicesAgent was using around 87-90% of CPU after that..... Running quiet right now using 91.8% of CPU...

Does anyone from Apple ever check these comments? 😕

petermac87 wrote:

enarwpg wrote:

Does anyone from Apple ever check these comments? 😕

No. You will need to contact them with feedback

Yeah I would have assumed they would have too, since we are in the "Apple Support Communities".

I just wanted to add another to this thread. I'm running Mavericks on a 27" i7 iMac. This service is constantly hogging Memory. Currently sitting at 371MB.

Cheers,

Rick

Based on your assumption, I change the privilege of of the whole folder by sudo chow -R user:admin /var/folders/30

And it turns out the problem is solved. Becasue the icon loading speed is sharp, less than 0.1 second for all icons loading.

Ok, I think I solved this problem.

Here's my solution:

1 - Kill "com.apple.IconServicesAgent" using Activity Monitor

2 - In Finder go to "Go to folder" under "Go" menu and paste: ~/Library/Caches/

3 - Delete "com.apple.finder" (save a copy as backup if you want)

4 - Kill Finder

That's it. Let me know if this works for you, it did for me.

You can watch what files are being opened with this shell command:

sudo fs_usage -f pathname -w com.apple.IconServicesAgent |grep open

In my case, both VideoLan Client (VLC) and MPlayer were generating icons for the same file, going back and forth in an infinite loop. Uninstalling MPlayer made it stop. Uninstalling VLC probably would have done the same.

This isn't a solution, but it might be a helpful data point if anyone has a Radar or support ticket open on this and is already exploring it with an Apple tech.