What is com.apple.IconServicesAgent?

The solution I posted here only partially worked. Killing the service doesn't work. Whenever finder is opened it is automatically started and straight away goes back to eating CPU time. The only way to get it to behave is to create the a temp folder it requires. I added mkdir ${TMPDIR}/com.apple.IconServices to my .bashrc. I use the terminal a lot, so this works for me by creating the temp directory whenever I spawn the terminal.

It's the default app, I used automator to make the script, if you want i can post it to you somewhere, here, try to get it from here

I tried that, the temp folder already exists whenever I tried to create it...

Nice, Thanks for the download...it worked fine, however, I do see how the Icon Service Agent reboots within a few minutes....Hopefully this will help speed up the startup process with one less app running.

My folder:

/private/var/folders

Where this is reported as writing to

now has 2.39 GB in it.

Can I delete the contents?

Thanks ...
Ken

5 days later and it's 970 MB.

Strange.

Ken

I reinstalled Mac OS X Mavericks from scratch. Other than fixing icon services my fans don't spin up nearly as much as they used to. Computer is running way cooler and performance is much better, even now that I have added all my applications back. 2 days in icon services has not been misbehaving and is only at 200MB memory usage.

I found a fix that seems to work, see http://blog.hsoi.com/2014/02/25/my-slow-mac-mavericks-coreservicesd-iconservices agent-and-how-fs_usage-saved-me/comment-page-1/

If you have the same problem and the solutions given in this thread don't work, please run sudo fs_usage -f pathname -w com.apple.IconServicesAgent | grep open in the Terminal and post your output here.

For me, XCode seemed to be the problem.

Uninstalled XCode by sudo -r /Applications/XCode.app. Cleared all caches by sudo rm -r /Library/Caches and ~/Library/Caches, then mkdir of the same (don’t know and think that this step is necessary). Reinstalled XCode.

Problem gone.

Just cleaned up the huge icon cache that the OSX official Twitter app creates. I had over 16.5k icons in my tweetie cache (about 1.5 Gb worth of data). Deleted the whole lot, locked the directory as per instructions here: http://osxdaily.com/2014/08/22/stop-twitter-for-mac-image-cache/ - the agent memory use went from a few hundred Mb to about 7.

In my particular case, following did NOT help:

`killall -KILL com.apple.IconServicesAgent`

`mkdir -p ${TMPDIR}/com.apple.IconServices`

However, I was watching its behaviour via

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

and saw extensive activity in various dirs (including VLC dir, and inside some system services dirs, like /System/Library/Extensions/IOStorageFamily.kext/Contents/Resources). I could reinstall VLC, but IOStorageFamily is sort of built in...

Anyway, **after a bit deeper research, the culprit turned out to be XtraFinder! I restarted and updated XtraFinder, and so far IconServicesAgent has been quiet.**

You can just restart OR shut down com.apple.IconServicesAgent in Activity Monitor but this don't solve the problem!

I have the same questions about checking out comments! Think it´s about 6-8 weeks (have to check it out) sins my mac start from rest with processor hang about once every morning. I can stop it with a restart or by ending the process in active monitor - This does not solve the problem, this must somebody from Apple read or detect .. or (?)

Have to try .. give my feedback later

Anybody knows if this has improved in Yosemite?

Here is a tip to address memory issue with com.apple.IconServicesAgent :

I didn't have as much of high CPU problem as much as the amount of memory com.apple.IconServicesAgent consumes.. At peak I used to have 5.4 GB and was constantly busy with refreshing the icon cache and somehow this or something else would also modify Aliases once in a few hours. So I would end up with always changes 100's of Aliases (maybe the icons in Aliases). Of course this would tick a number of problems including frequent Spotlight Indexing and Time Machine which now would think the Aliases have changed so they need to be backed up. I ended up with about 20GB of folders in Time Machine representing backup of constantly modified Aliases. As result the agent would use quite a bit of CPU.

Fortunately I have 16Gb in total. After solving issue below I managed to reduce the size of the agent to about 1GB in memory and it's pretty quiet on CPU too.

My first conscious step was to make the Aliases "locked" files, so they can't be modified by any process. This helped and it reduced the CPU usage by om.apple.IconServicesAgent and completely silenced Time Machine and Spotlight Indexing.

So I figured it's Aliases and how Mavericks deals with them and decided to change the Aliases to Symlinks. The aliases in Mavericks are huge. Coming from Snow Leopard it's a jump. I had a total of about 3.5 GB of aliases pointing to apps on OSX. So I created Symlinks instead of aliases. The size of all close to 1000 of symlinks is now 300KB !! whereas before the combined size of aliases was 3.5 GB !!. No wonder..

The disadvantage with Symlinks they break if items are moved, and, it seems they are not indexed by spotlight (haven't figured out yet).

But I it's not issue for example for things like Apps. I find it useful to group apps of same category if I don't remember the name.

If you're having the problem where com.apple.IconServicesAgent is going crazy in mavericks, hogging the CPU and spinning up your fan, there is a temporary fix. The temporary fix is on the web in several places, but I'll repeat it here, followed by the actual fix.

First go to Applications - Utilities - Console

look for error messages in the console log like: com.apple.IconServicesAgent Failed to write to file /var/folders/xx/LOADOFJUNKHERE/T/com.apple.IconServices/ANOTHERLOADOFJUNKHERE

where xx is some two character directory name and LOADOFJUNKHERE is a load of junk here

Now open up a terminal and make a directory in the right place:

mkdir /var/folders/xx/LOADOFJUNKHERE/T/com.apple.IconServices/

by replacing xx and LOADOFJUNKHERE with what you see in the console log

The console may have additional error messages relating to com.apple.IconServicesAgent that mention specific software. Upgrade or uninstall these. In my case, microsoft silverlight was having problems that were fixed by an upgrade.

That will fix it temporarily, but it will return on restarts etc.

*Actual fix*

The root cause is almost certainly that you have installed software that is very aggressive in cleaning temporary directories on closure. This may have been before upgrading to mavericks, and the problem has been triggered by the upgrade. In my case this was the music player 'ecoute'. I uninstalled this and the problem has gone away permanently. To find your offender is trial and error. You'll need to turn off and on non-OS stuff sequentially and see what does it. The problem will not manifest itself obviously unless you open up a finder or downloads etc and scan through a number of directories where many icons are required. Open up the activity monitor (applications - utilities - activity monitor) and watch what happens with external software running while you open the finder and scan around various directories.