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the com.apple.IconServicesAgent process goes over 99% CPU and blocks Finder operations
killing the process with the Activity Monitor things go back to normal
what else could i do to slve this problem?
Mac mini, OS X Mavericks (10.9), Snow Leopard to Mavericks upgrade
I have a same thing. Came up today. CPU 99-100%.
Same here. I've been using since DP1. Anyone have this problem who installed only the final release?
I had the same problem.
Try increasing the disk quota for the user that owns the failing com.apple.IconServicesAgent process.
That solved my problem.
Though, it seems to need a lot of disk space. Had to go from 500MB to 5GB to make it work.
Is this the way to do it?
Below is an executive summary version of Eric's instructions, with a fix to get repquota working:
Rebooting, then ⌘+R to get into recovery mode and then fixing permissions using the Disk Utility did the trick for me.
In fact, I 'd recommend doing this any way.
Same here and the permissions' fixing did the trick too !
don't fixed mine...
I discovered it's some app start on login related...
probably all of us had upgraded OS X Maverick, not a clean installed one.
Can you confirm us?
The IconServicesAgent is now using only 21.4MB of memory after I disabled some apps from "Login Itens"
- KeyRemap4MacBook
- Moon
I opened both apps now and the resources is the same 21.4MB, without changes.
##### TESTED
Yes, it works for me.
Go to Preferences > Users & Groups > Login Itens
Note and disable some apps: select with cursor and click on "-"
Reboot and look at Activity Monitor if the procedure was successful.
Open the app you disabled from startup and look if it changes the memory/cpu usage.
Can you explain what you mean (specifically) by your fixing permissions solution with the Disk Utility? Sorry, not that advanced. Thank you!
I too am having the same issue since Mavericks
seen here.
Help
56friedl, I appreciate you suggestion and would like to implement it but I probably lack the skills.
I executed the terminal commands you suggested but they did not quite work for me. All the commands executed without error, but they don't seem to have done anything. After each command, I was returned to the next command line. That is, no list of users or info to edit was generated. I used the edquota command you give in step 6 using the name of the users listed in Activity Monitor, and even that doesn't seem to kick me into vi or to do anything at all for me.
Is there a text file that vi is supposed to edit? Maybe I could forget Terminal and just make the edits using Text Wrangler or another text editor? Or is it a binary file that needs editing, and if so is there a Mac editor app for it?
Thanks for your help.
I was having several issues with IconServices. First it was large memory usage. Later is was high CPU usage. Right now it's hovering around 10MB which is better than the 300MB I was seeing before. Here is what I did to to get it to behave better:
Open terminal and type:
cp ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist ~/com.apple.finder.plist.backup
rm ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist&&killall Finder
This seems to restart the IconServices process and make behave better. This lasted about a week. Next I noticed that the IconServices process was taking up a large amount of CPU usage, but the process was running as an alternate user. I also noticed several read/write errors in the log. All related to /var/folders. The runaway process might be related to not having access to the /var/folders. So I force quit the other user's process and then ran:
sudo chmod -R o+rxX /var/folders/*
This will allow all users to read/write to everything in /var/folders.
Next I rebooted. This seems to have solved the memory and CPU problem, atleast temporarily. I'll keep an eye on it over the next few days and report back.
The memory issue re-appeared a few days later. I examined the logs in Console and was getting several read/write errors. Turns out my hard drive was failing. I replaced the hard drive with a SSD and re-installed. The performance boost was amazing. After re-install, IconServices was up to 100MB at one point, but then dropped down to 16MB after a day or so. Unfortunately, I cannot say if my experience was an issue with OSX or the hard drive.
i got a temporary solution by disabling the user (who was using the iconservice) on my os x server mavericks.
God if Steve had been there It would have been solved since a while !!
Apple support, are you reading the discussions ??
updates are supposed to solve problems, not add them !!
Aurelio
updates are supposed to solve problems, not add them !!
Mostly opposite of my experience. 😟
com.apple.iconservice agent problems mavericks
