What is com.apple.IconServicesAgent?

"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."

It has been 3 hours now and com.apple.IconServicesAgent has not gone crazy in my Console and Activity Monitor. I won't believe it is solved until I see it still gone tomorrow (I've thought other things had it fixed but it always came back), but it is looking good. Thanks for this.

Mark

Resetting the preferences to default will not work, meaning . I already tried, first thing in fact. I'm having issues on bothe the 2010 iMac and the 2011 MacBook Pro. The service seems to be buggy, either the icon service or the Finder. Wouldn't be surprised the is was just released alligator ago. Temporary fix is open activity monitor and force kill the process. Then relaunch the finder (not necessary but I do it as a precaution).

I have this same problem, and would like to try your approach, but I don't know how to kill the "com.apple.IconServicesAgent" using Activity Monitor. Can you explain?

Incidentally, com.apple.IconServicesAgent doesn't show when I look for it in Preferences; where is it hidden and how do I find it to delete its prefs, a usual cure for such problems.

I just restarted in recovery mode, repaired permissions, and restarted: immediately the physical memory usage started to climb, from less than 50% to almost the whole 4GB; the largest consumers are virusbarriers, at 450.9 MB, kernal_task at 433.9MB and IconServiceAgent at 317.3. On my old MacBook, running OS 10.7.5, these items don't even show up. Doing little but examining the screen, CPU usage is v. low, so the slowness (spinning beachball) when I start on something serious must be the shuffling the system is doing to create virtual memory.

Clearly Mavericks is not fit for purpose. I would like to go back to Mountain Lion, but don't know what I would lose if I do.

APPLE.COM - WHAT ARE YOU DOING ABOUT THIS PROBLEM?

To kill a process with Activity Monitor just double click the process and a popup will give you the option of "Sample" and "Quit". Select "Quit". Yet another popup will give you the choice of "Cancel", "Force Quit" and "Quit". Select "Force Quit" and the process will stop and Finder should begin to respond again.

I tried this on the item "Kernal_task", which is the biggest consumer of memory (447MB!), and got the result reproted above. However, when I did it with 'IconServicesAgent', the action boxes were live and I have successfully removed i. Whether it will be there when i restart remains to be seen. I will try it later, but now I have work to do.

About the worst possible thing you can do is start killing processes at random if you know nothing about their purpose. Kernel task is responsible for handling most of what the operating system is doing in the background. Killing it will crash your system.

If you don't know what it does, leave it alone, even if you think it's using too much memory.

same problem here. FYI, I started with clean install of Mavericks on a new macbook pro

Relevant file: /System/Library/com.apple.iconservices.iconservicesd.plist

$ man iconservicesd

[could not copy/paste; man page is there but not filled in]

$ launchctl info

...

- 0 com.apple.IconServicesAgent

- 0 com.apple.iconservicesd

I could not use launchctl to unload.

McGroarty wrote:

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.

Thank you. This helped me resolve the issue. My Finder was very slow in rendering the icons of the files, and when I was trying to attach files in Mail.app it took forever for the files to show up in the popup window. I opened the console and Activity Monitor, and I saw the processes "com.apple.IconServicesAgent" and "com.apple.appkit.xpc.openandsavepanelservice". I typed in your shell command and tried to recreate the problem. In the terminal I saw "/Applications/Xcode.app" running in some kind of loop. Deleting Xcode.app resolved the problem.

I have something different that worked for me. Maybe it will help others.

1st, thanks for all the suggestions in this post. I tried the most popular ones and they did not help me but they guided me to places to investigate. Here's what worked for me.

In Activity Monitor, I activated the User column from the View Menu: View/Columns/User. Then I sorted by Process Name to discover that I had 3 instances of com.apple.IconServicesAgent. They were listed under 3 different "users": (1) my usual Mac login account, (2) a 2nd account that I had created for debugging use but that I basically never use, and (3) BOINC. Boinc is an application I use to share my computer at night with SETI and Einstein and some other projects. To my knowledge it is not a user, but nonetheless it was listed as such. Users 2 and 3 were pegged at 99% CPU usage and were the cause of slowing my computer since upgrading to Mavericks. User 1 was mostly registering 0% CPU usage but jumped momentarily to around 20% when I would open a new finder folder with lots of files (i.e., lots of icons) in it.

The only solution I found that would work for me was a simple one. First, I removed the 2nd user (using System Preferences) . Second, I disabled the BOINC application. Removing the 2nd user immediately eliminated the 2nd instance of com.apple.IconServicesAgent. However, I had to also reboot in order to eliminate the 3rd one.

I have seen this behavior with my machine (10.9.1 MacBook Unibody Early 2008) largely related to DropBox. It may be due to DropBox changing Icons when they are synced. Maybe try to pause syncing and see if you have the similar behavior.

I found this on github: "When "com.apple.IconServicesAgent" exhausts CPU resources on Mac OSX mavericks (10.9), you can try following workaround.": https://gist.github.com/sgr/7835954"

It's just one line of code:

mkdir ${TMPDIR}/com.apple.IconServices

This recreates the com.apple.IconServices directory, which apparently gets itself deleted from time to time. I typed that in Terminal while IconServicesAgent was using 99% CPU and it immediately dropped it to .2%

I had the same problem on my MacBook Air Mid 2011 with Mavericks (OS X 10.9.1) installed.

com.apple.IconServicesAgent used an average of 200% of the CPU, although it cached just 15 MB. After having reopened the finder, all icons had disappeared. The same happened when I tried to perform a killAll Dock from terminal. This time most of the Dock icons disappeared. In console I got continuous error messages telling me that this service failed to write file in a subfolder of /var/folders/.

I simply fixed this with a reboot. CPU usage returned around 0%, fan noise returned to normality.

After the reboot, however, this service cached about 150MB in the RAM. Easily fixed this too running a memory clean utility.

I hope this will help someone.

Luca

All of these "fixes" only temporarily solve the problem. For those wondering, the easiest way to temporarily solve this is to simply kill the process from activity monitor. I've tried every other solution in this thread, and they all only work for a matter of hours -- a day at most. I kill this process a few times per day whenever I hear my fans starting to run louder (I just open up activity monitor and lo and behold, there it is again). So obviously something happens that causes this problem to keep coming up again and again.

When I first saw this thread, probably mid December, com.apple.IconServicesAgent was using 180-200MB memory. Over the last few weeks it has ranged from 7MB to around 80MB. I have never noticed any system performance degradation and when occasionally checking with Activity Monitor it has always been using 0.0% CPU and around .50 CPU Time. Obviously I haven't tried any of the fixes listed here. (MB Air 2013 4GB; 10.9.1)

Actually, I upgraded to Mavericks in October and I had to do the fix just two times...

Probably I'm just lucky... Still can't understand what causes this issue. I'll keep an eye on my activites when it happens.