Q: Any one else have the com.apple.IconServicesAgent going nuts-problem?

@ehudson17,

Can you keep us posted as to whether the problem stays solved for you? The Safe Mode thing makes me doubtful.

Sure thing. So far almost 24 hours and all is good. I've been using my Macbook all morning, nothing too CPU heavy just streaming some videos and writing in Open Office for school. CPU core temp is 40-50 degrees C (was peaking at 100C before). Fans aren't on and most importantly that pesky runaway process is not on my activity monitor. Have an average of 2.5GB of RAM free (4.0GB total). Before i had around 500Mb free.

Good to hear!

be careful force-quitting it. According to the apple support person I spoke with on Friday it is a necessary process (new to Mavericks), so force-quitting it may affect how some of your applications run.

ehudson17 - Were you certain that you were using the most current version of iStat Menus? I know they had some issues previously (Mavericks stuff), but I have the latest running and was able to solve the CPU issues through unrelated means.

I would also check to see what 3rd party kext's are running. I had several that were leftovers from some previous non-maverick's compatible installs. They can be real stinkers to remove. One from Audio Hijack Pro wouldn't even uninstall from the unistaller. I also had 'CoolBook2.kext' leftover from another fan control software. Again, the uninstaller left it.

From the terminal:

kextstat | grep -v apple

You can unload it with:

sudo kextunload /System/Library/Extensions/NAMEOFKEXT.kext

...but you should remove it from the folder or it will just reload.

Thanks for the info. Yes I was using the lastest version of iStat. I decided to use temperature monitor instead (https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/12381/temperature-monitor), so far all is running fine.

MacBook Pro 13 Mid-2012

2,9 GHz i7  8GB RAM   500 GB SSD

After update to 19.9.2, com.apple.IconServicesAgent using 155% CPU… After looking here and at some other places without finding a straight solution (although, as you’ll see, in the end I followed a suggestion pointing to my user login items which, when I read it, didn’t convince me), I’ve found the problem and its solution, at least for me.

1) Went to console and, following other suggestion I’d found elsewhere, noted the PID of the process (264 in my case)

2) As per other suggestion, I typed the following at a terminal window:

                    ps awxu | grep 264

and the system answered pointing to «Default Folder X Helper»

3) I disabled «Default Folder X Helper» in my Login Items window and restarted. The problem persisted, but CPU usage went down to about 90-100%: Not enough!

4) Just reinstalled Default Folder X, checked "Enable at login" again at DFX's Preferences window, and restarted… And, so far, all is OK

Again, the key were steps 1 and 2. I hope this can help at least some of you, and I’d like to thank all those whose suggestions have helped me to solve this problem.

My Mavericks server used one processor 100% on com.apple.IconServicesAgent after I installed a mail server and added mail accounts to network users.

The log files stated that it was impossible to write some data.

When I tried to access those files in terminal, I could not access some of the directories as su!

The rigts were absolutely wrong.

Changing recursively to root:wheel with 755 did the trick for me.

The log file look like they should and the load of the server is again about 5%.

Of course it is a work around! What caused this mess is unknown.

Adding my 2 cents:

I'm on a brand new Mac Pro, latest Mavericks, no upgrade installation here.

I have installed some apps, and will be going through the "remove login items" approach to see if I can pinpoint this. It did not happen for the first couple weeks, but did start as I ramped up using this machine more and installed more apps. Unfortunately I can't correlate the two. :-/

Right now here is what I do know:

• For myself, it is always triggered by poking around in the Finder. If I open a new window and browse through more than a few directories, I start to get the problem. At first I thought maybe it was DropBox or Google Drive with their icon overlays, but just now it happened again simply by browsing some "normal" folders. I landed on the Downloads folder when it happened, and all the file icons were missing and IconServicesAgent started going nuts. I think this can also be triggered by an Open/Save dialog which also accessed the Finder directory structure.
• sudo ${TMPDIR}/com.apple.IconServicesAgent works sometimes, or sometimes errors with a "cannot be found" or "already exists" message. When it works and creates the directory, it does not calm down the IconServicesAgent process.
• The only thing that helps is killall -KILL com.apple.IconServicesAgent, which I have to do as often as I go browsing around in the Finder too much. :-/

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.**