User profile for user: j.birkenmaier
j.birkenmaier Author
User level: Level 1
18 points

macOS Mojave - iconservicesagent misbehaving again

The OS daemon iconservicesagent is once again gobbling up memory 10+GB sometimes as much as 23GB along with more CPU. All I have to do is open a directory with custom icons and the daemon kicks in. It can run for ten, twenty or more minutes. It's not the CPU usage that causes trouble it is all the RAM being used. The Force Quit window pops up regularly and wants me to force quit some Applications because all the application memory has been used up. It practically bricks my MacBook Pro until the daemon eventually finishes. If I open the directory again, it starts all over.


This identical problem first showed up in the previous OS. I notified Apple about it and had to wait months for them to fix it. Well, the problem is back and I don't want to wait (I have notified Apple...again). If anyone has a suggestion, I would like to hear it.

MacBook Pro TouchBar and Touch ID, macOS Mojave (10.14)

Posted on Sep 24, 2018 9:18 PM

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User profile for user: I3rendan
I3rendan
User level: Level 1
9 points

Posted on Nov 1, 2018 1:02 PM

I had this issue as well since I have a couple hundred movie files with custom file icons (setup using the MovieIcon app). Things became unusable when I opened my Movies folder. I had to go through and remove the custom icons -- this would have taken a long time but I used this script in Terminal to make quick work of it (be sure you cover all the possible file extensions, not just ".mp4")...


find ~/Movies -name "*.mp4" | while read f ; 
do xattr -d com.apple.ResourceFork "$f" ; 
done


What this script is doing is just looping through all files in my "Movies" folder and removing the icon (what MacOS calls "ResourceFork") for each file. Hope this helps!

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18 replies
User profile for user: I3rendan
I3rendan
User level: Level 1
9 points

Nov 13, 2018 11:39 AM in response to The Popper

You do probably want the quotes since they won't hurt the command and some folder / hard drive names have a space in there but if your HD name doesn't have any spaces, you can not use the quotes. The returns are in there to help break down the commands, but you can do it in a single line, like so...


find "/Volumes/EXT HD NAME" -name "*.mp4" | while read f ; do xattr -d com.apple.ResourceFork "$f" ; done

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macOS Mojave - iconservicesagent misbehaving again

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