Q: What is com.apple.IconServicesAgent?

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.

Thank you...

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.

Chiming in...   Memory in use range this morning is 184 - 199 MB.  No CPU activity however.  MacBook Air 2013; 10.9.1

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 do not have DropBox installed nor have I used the web version since upgrading to Mavericks.

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%

@paulrudy: That was it! When I arrived at work today IconServicesAgent was consuming 226% CPU.  After creating that folder, it dropped to 0.2% after a couple of seconds.  Thank you!

Yep - fixed mine too.  Yay you.

Yes - this fixed my problem as well.  I find this issue occuring almost every day. 

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.

I have the same problem over and over again.

Mainly using

mkdir ${TMPDIR}/com.apple.IconServices

which works for some time but evenutally the process goes rogoue again. Apple please fix this!