Memory leak on W7 x64 Post iOS9 upgrades iCloudServices.exe

The process is started at boot time by a registry key in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run:

"iCloudServices"="C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Apple\Internet Services\iCloudServices.exe"

I disabled it with MSCONFIG, but the key was restored when iTunes was updated from 12.3 to 12.3.1. If you remove the key or disable the registry entry with MSCONFIG, it should stay off until iTunes is updated and the machine is rebooted.

Occurs on win 10 32bit as well, noticed the service was using way more than than I expected while trying to inspect the new ram compression feature of win10.

This certainly needs to be fixed, I can't leave it running ever now.

I have this problem as well. I am running v5.0 of the iCloud Services application on Windows 10 x64 Enterprise.

I logged on this morning to see a running low on memory, and a prompt to close iCloud Services application. When the application initially starts, it is around 22 MB of RAM, with in 5 minutes it is using over 30MB of RAM, and it is still rising. There is an obvious memory leak in this application.

I am going to kill the application until the next Apple update. Kind of ridiculous that it has been a ongoing problem for 4 months.

Add me to the list... Win 7 64 Bit. I never use iCloud on my desktop so have been thinking of uninstalling but I rather thought this would be fixed by now.

I'm joining the thread so I can check up on any updates.

I have it at 1.4 GB or RAM. At least it makes Dropbox not look so bad.

Is it worthwhile me putting a wee programme together to kill icloudservices.exe every x hours? And restart it (if it hasn't automatically) after one hour?

It could maybe also keep a time-stamped CSV log of the memory usage for this exe - depending on how much info I can gather. I might even be able to include the ongoing version info ....

I'll start digging into it if y'all think it's worth it.

Most definitely 🙂. Apple seems to have abandoned us, so yes please. I don't think you need to worry about a restart. I've noticed it does that quite regularly and reliably itself ( or maybe Outlook does this?). I also noticed that even if you kill the process, syncing still works, implying that icloudservices.exe stays resident until it's automatically reloaded and presumably overwrites the existing copy in memory.

I discovered this after I renamed icloudservices.exe and found that it was then that the syncing no longer worked, i.e. when Outlook (or the resident portion of icloudservices) tried to call the program and failed. No idea if this will help you in writing the app, but thought I'd mention it, just in case.

Phil.

Anyupdate to this from apple? I hate this darn memory leak after 3-4 days its using almost 2 gigs of ram

I think we've all pretty well established that Outlook automatically reloads the iCloudservices.exe file, so the simplest fix (hopefully temporarily) would be to kill the service, say once a day around midnight or early morning. That should in theory be possible to do via the Scheduler Service...... Not sure if you can use it to terminate a process....

The simplest way if you just want to kill it daily would be to create a .bat file containing:

TaskKill /im iCloudServices.exe

And use Task Scheduler to schedule it.

I suppose it could be more frequently if needed.

Hmm... Not having much luck here... It doesn't close/kill the process. Any tips?

C:\Users\Desktop>taskkill /im icloudservices.exe

SUCCESS: Sent termination signal to the process "iCloudServices.exe" with PID 18832.

OK, solved the problem. It needs the forced taskkill switch added to the command.

So it is: taskkill /im icloudservices.exe /f

Being new to this command, I wondered if you had to specify a path to the file, but testing this showed that it finds that itself.

I've put this command in a batch (.bat) file (called it taskkill icloudservices.bat) and set up a schedule to run every hour. This still allows Outlook to load icloudservices by itself, but restricts it to not growing to more than about 70Mb. Whilst it is not loaded/killed, Outlook continues to sync, so all good here. (it must have a resident (TSR) copy of it).

Not sure if not running icloudservices.exe affects syncing of photos - not tested that yet. If you need access to the iCloud control pane at any time, you can load it manually from the Program List. The kill task will kill it on the hour, so all good again.

If you would like me to post my Scheduler settings, let me know and I'll post a few screen shots.

Until Apple fix this issue, this is probably one of the simplest automated ways of preventing icloudservices.exe from growing without limit. If you don't mind it growing up to 1Gb, you could probably get away by just killing it once a day. There is a switch that lets you nominate the max size the file can grow to before killing it, but I could not get that to work.