iconservices folders taking up many GB of space

Question

Level 1

52 points

iconservices folders taking up many GB of space

In duplicating my Mavericks boot partition to a backup drive I noticed that there was a 6GB + difference in the size between the running partition and the backup partition.

I used SpaceGremlin to compare the two partitions and see that Maverick creates huge "com.apple.IconServices" folders within the private > var > folders.

Each is several GBs in size.

What is going on?

I don't see how this can be normal.

Mavericks is also creaing swapfiles at peak useage equaling over a GB (even though I haven't activated any apps like Photoshop that would normally account for this.

In installing Mavericks I installed it to a partition that was 50GB which allows approx. 15GB of overhead after all of my extra apps are included. But with these additional huge folders and swapfiles being created it has almost halved my available overhead. Not good.

Any info regarding this would be appreciated.

TIA

Ron

iMac, OS X Mavericks (10.9), 27 inch

Posted on Oct 28, 2013 11:29 PM

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Answer 1

owenleej

Level 1

0 points

Oct 31, 2013 4:48 PM in response to RonL

I am having some issues with iconservices as well. I am running some automated testing that creates and deletes a lot of users accounts, and I found that Mavericks makes an entire new 500MB+ iconservices cache for each user. This quickly filled the drive of my VM and killed my automated tests.

The only info I can find anywhere about IconServices is a developer document that says it was deprecated a long time ago. I have tested 10.7 and 10.8 and IconServices is nowhere to be found on those versions.

These huge caches show up in:

/var/folders/(2 characters)/(64-bit encoded something)/C/com.apple.IconServices/

This folder is filled with tons of files ending in .iscachebmp

It appears a new copy of this huge folder is created for each user account created, each with difference random-ish paths inside the /var/folders/ directory.

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Answer 2

RonL Author

Level 1

52 points

Oct 31, 2013 5:25 PM in response to owenleej

For users with only one partition they'll probably never be aware of it (unless they use a disk space utility that will expose them).

However for anyone that has their disk divided in to partitions so that their OS is on a partition with around 15GB of overhead (as I thought I would have)... it is extrememly noticeable. And if a user only left approx. 10GB of overhead (i.e. Mountain Lions' size + 10GB)... they will need to move their OS to a different (i.e. larger) partition.

I installed Mavericks on a 10GB larger partition than Mountain Lion was on (50GB versus 40GB). But all of these 'mystery' files/folders took up almost all of the additional space.

I'd really like to know what Apple did to use up approx. 5-6GB of space that Mountain Lion never needed and that NO WHERE does Apple mention in any of its white papers, etc.

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Answer 3

cmalkiel

Level 1

11 points

Nov 2, 2013 2:50 PM in response to RonL

I recently upgraded to Mavericks (on a single partition) and am finding that IconServices is using more memory than any other application/service. It's well over half a GB.

I'd like some kind of explanation from Apple what this is doing. At the same time, I'm having very slow app and document icon loading; i.e., a blank document for a few seconds, or longer.

Very curious and annoyed by the icon slowness.

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Answer 4

RonL Author

Level 1

52 points

Nov 2, 2013 4:21 PM in response to cmalkiel

You'd certainly think that anything that would take up such a huge amount of room, etc. in a new system... Apple would have something to say about.

Hey Apple... how 'bout a footnote somewhere?

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Answer 5

Feb 20, 2014 8:16 AM in response to RonL

booted in safe mode, restarted and all the temp files were gone. sorted now!

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