What is com.apple.IconServicesAgent?

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.

Disk and Permissions Repairs run again several times - doesnt seem to make a difference here. Issues persist.

TIA.

mine once went to 190% CPU with loud fan noise. I closed all apps still it was same. So i just restarted to get back to normal.

I'm getting the same issue. Hopefully a fix is coming soon.

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)

The same problem!Using 99% CPU and the finder not work 😠

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.

just started....

osx 10.9

creative cloud

apache

mysql

...now windows is better

I noticed that iconServicesAgent on my Mini is usng 0% CPU so not sure why others have high numbers.

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.

My finder crashes all the time, the fans run constantly, and this process is the culprit... I've done all the google drive "fixes" and none of them work!!

...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? 😕