What is com.apple.IconServicesAgent?

When I was speaking to apple support, they implicitly acknowledged issues. The major point seems to be that if we upgraded to Mavericks (most of us I suspect given that was the way we were led there by apple) then there are issues. I have been told to reformat the disk and re-install Mavericks. I am however reluctant to do that. In the meantiome I am keeping an eye on this and other forums, and making sure the process doesn't get to hungry on CPU memory....in which case i force quit and all is better for a while

Woodsterofarabia wrote:

I have been told to reformat the disk and re-install Mavericks.

If you were told by an Apple support representative to format and reinstall, that person should not be working at Apple.

If anyone else has told you to format and reinstall, never listen to that person's advice regarding MacOS, ever again. Any 'solution' offered that is destructive to user data is not a solution.

I realize that Microsoft has normalized the idea of destroying an entire filesystem to save it, but we are not living in Microsoftland here.

While I tried everything suggested here and the problem kept coming back. I finally removed everything from System Preferences -> "Users & Groups" -> "Current User" -> "Login Items" and gradually added them back until the problem recurred. In my case it was the MenuEverywhere.app that was causing the problem. As long as I don't use that the problem hasn't been back and it has now been several weeks.

About a month ago, I updated OSX. For the past day or so, Finder would not load the contents of folders. Period. Some icons also did not show up. In the Activity Monitor, I killed the "com.apple.IconSevicesAgent" (which was using ~300% of my RAM) and my Finder is back to its pre-10.9 glory.

Yes, SNTALN, that worked! At least for a few hours! No more freezing of my cursor every minute!

SNTLN's solution:

1 - Kill "com.apple.IconServicesAgent" using Activity Monitor (I forced quit from the popup window)

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)

However, don't muck with any other memory hog like kernel_task !

Problem solved here: http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2014/01/07/an-issue-in-mavericks-with-com-d ot-apple-dot-iconservicesagent/

The short answer is to open Terminal and do:

mkdir ${TMPDIR}/com.apple.IconServices

Apparently a directory was missing, causing the IconServices to thrash. The above command creates that directory. I tried this and the CPU usage *immediately* went to normal, and the problems I has having with Finder stopped.

All credit goes to Kieran Healy for this fix.

This is only a temporary fix. Killing the process from activity monitor works just as well, but it's always temporary. I suspect that it has something to do with: 1) Google Drive 2) Tabbed Finder Windows and 3) Dropbox.

Can anyone confirm having these?

MacBook Pro 13 Mid-2012

2,9 GHz i7 8GB RAM

After updating to 10.9.2, com.apple.IconServicesAgent was using 155% CPU… After looking here and at some other places without finding a straight solution (although, as you’ll see, in the end I followed a suggestion pointing to my user login items which, when I read it, didn’t convince me), I’ve found the problem and its solution, at least for me.

1) Went to console and, following other suggestion I’d found elsewhere, noted the PID of the process (264 in my case)

2) As per other suggestion, I typed the following at a terminal window:

ps awxu | grep 264

and the system answered pointing to «Default Folder X Helper»

3) I disabled «Default Folder X Helper» in my Login Items window and restarted. The problem persisted, although CPU usage went down to about 90-100%: Not enough!

4) Reinstalled Default Folder X, checked "Enable at login" again at DFX's Preferences window, and restarted… And, so far, all is OK

The key steps seem to be 1 and 2. I hope that this can help at least some of you. And I’d like to thank all those whose suggestions have helped me to solve this problem.

After my attempts weeks ago I just went ahead and purchased a new iMac. These are good suggestions if my iMac and Mavericks slows down. Right now everything is operating flawlessly. My MacBook drive never recovered after all my attampts to fix the IconServicesAgent; I think it was dying after five years. I will replace it with an SSD in the near future. This is a great forum.

Here's something interesting.

In poring over the files on my work machine, I discovered an ancient zip archive, made sometime in 2012, that contained 66 GB of data - all photos. Some were RAW format and others were JPG. This was all material that exists elsewhere and had been kept for backup purposes, so I was able to delete it without any qualms, and did.

Since deleting that archive, my com.apple.iconServicesAgent RAM usage has dropped to about 40 MB, down from 300+ (as recently as this morning).

Best guess is that it was trying to cache the image data in the zip file. We'll see if it stays low or not.

Really don't think it's a good idea to just go killing processes — particularly system processes — even if they do suck up a lot of RAM. That's a good way to end up with an unstable system.

On my end, it looks as though eliminating that 66 GB zip archive didn't do the trick, at least not as of this morning; iconServicesAgent is up to 250 MB. Too bad — it almost made sense, since Spotlight (for instance) indexes zip archive contents. It seemed plausible that iconServicesAgent was trying to do the same.

I can confirm tha Dropbox inflated the com.apple.IconServicesAgent to almost 200mb.

Disabled the DB autostart and closed it, restarted and now com.apple.IconServicesAgent is max 15mb.

No CPU spikes either.. all good now.

rMBP 15' 2012, 256ssd, 8g ram, 10.9.2 and about 10 apps starting with the sistem (but not DB:))

the quota solved it for me.

I am running a osx-server and had the same problem com.apple.IconServicesAgent was using over 100% CPU for serveral month but just for one user-account. The funny thing - this user only uses mail and fileservices and never logged in remote or with shell. Today I saw in the servermanager there was 104MB disc-quota set for him, I put it to 1000MB and since then the problem was gone.

I've got the same problem. Read the whole thread and each reply and I've slimmed down my system removing any startup items and aything else running but still have com.apple.IconServicesAgent hogging 121.4Mb of RAM. I've also had some random stuff hapenning to my icons. Particularly an html file I saved on my desktop.

Given the speculation and and solutions that cater for different applications and user scenarios, the only thing left to do is create a new user and test or reinstall the system and install apps 1 by 1 (which I dont have time to do). Who knows what everybody is running on their machines... So the only solution to rule out 3rd party apps is do a clean install in this situation. I think somebody may have done this already anyway and as mentioned by another person on this thread is possibly distructive and will not help to solve the problem.

All this makes me think this is an unresolved system problem. Lets hope Apple have been watching this thread and are looking for the cause of the problem and will either fix the system or notify the developers.

My folder:

/private/var/folders

Where this is reported as writing to

has 1.37 GB in it.

This is way too much.

Running:

mkdir ${TMPDIR}/com.apple.IconServices

has resulted in 0.0% cpu usage for over 30 minutes so far.

After running it Terminal reported that the DIR already existed.

Thanks ...
Ken