Q: What is com.apple.IconServicesAgent?

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:))

This immediately solved the problem.  Thanks to google, the forums and Kieran Healy for this fix.

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.

I just discovered this problem with my new Mac Pro. It isn't using any real CPU but the ram usage ballooned to over 10GB (32GB installed). Immediately after a restart it's hovering around 100MB.

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

sgginc put me onto part of the solution.  It seems this silly service has tight integration with Finder.  Whenever I open a network share it starts going balistic and never stops.  Force Stop it in Activity monitor and delete all files in "${TMPDIR}/com.apple.IconServices", launch finder visit network share.  IconServicesAgent launches again but this time it behaves.  Not sure if this is a permanent fix, but so far so good.

I had the hope that the update to Mac OS X 10.9.3 would fix the problem with the com.apple.IconServicesAgent. But unfortunately it seems not to be fixed.

I updated my MacBook Pro to OS X 10.9.3 at the weekend. Today afternoon I noticed that the IconServicesAgent used nearly all of the CPU.

The "${TMPDIR}/com.apple.IconServices" command fixed it for me. It also fixed it two weeks ago and the IconServicesAgent seemed to behave well. But today it went out of order again.

In the console.app I found the messages "com.apple.IconServicesAgent: Failed to write file /var/folders ..." These messages started to occur two minutes after a message containing "process Adobe Photoshop [7636] caught causing excessive wakeups".

Then I got the messages "Adobe Photoshop CS5.1[7636]: Failed to generate image for binding CustomBinding ..." and "com.apple.IconServicesAgent[192]: Failed to write file /var/folders/..." on a rotating basis.

As I used the "${TMPDIR}/com.apple.IconServices" command IconServicesAgent decreased to a CPU usage of 0 %.

NO IMPROVMENTS even after Premissions repair and running ACLr8

Here's my latest screen

Actually I think I should be looking at the CPU use not the Memory use. And mine as dropped to almost NO use see image here:

@Magnat  What a Great idea for the Apple script.....any chance you can post the applescript code you wrote to do this?  I'd love to try it myself.

Here you go, save it as an Application.

killall -KILL com.apple.IconServicesAgent

@Magnat Thanks....Is this AppleScript Editor? or another app you are using?

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.