Q: What is com.apple.IconServicesAgent?

enarwpg wrote:

 

 

Does anyone from Apple ever check these comments?

No. You will need to contact them with feedback

FEEDBACK    http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

Cheers

Pete

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.

Me too on a MBP. It is currently using 95%. Loud fan noise and machine is to hot to sit on lap.

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.

sntain - Did not work here.

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.

"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 get the pop-up window, but the options: Sample and Quit, are greyed out and inactive. I don't see the second pop-up; what should  I do to open it?

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.