iconservicesagent OS Mojave issue

I appreciate what you've provided helps restore the computer to functionality, however to be clear to Apple more than you, this is NOT a solution.

Not because it didn't work. I won't try it. I took my iMac to an Apple Store Genius Bar, and a wonderful employee fixed my problem, and restored it to High Sierra. Guess what? No problems at all with icons. His advice was to never upgrade the OS unless you know why you are.

It's disgusting that a $3,000 iMac runs fine on OLD software, but when updated, is unusable. I assume this will be fixed over the next year of updates, but it's still unacceptable. I have been using Macs for over a decade, and have built a massive film and HD music collection on external HD that all have wonderful bright artwork. To say I would need to erase this to use my new Mac, when my 2012 MacBook Air runs it fine, is absurd.

I do appreciate your response and effort. Thanks

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!

I've got the same problem, 100% agree with you, but unfortunately this process is necessary in order to see the icons properly so our hands and feet are tied...

In my case iconservicesagent process begin to devour GBs of RAM and normally Finder collapses. No matter if I try to access internal or external hard drives, the problem remains the same.

I tried two "solutions" which didn't work for me:

a) Deleting: /Library/Caches/com.apple.iconservices.store (you´ll be prompted for your administrator login password). More info.

b) Creating a temporary directory: mkdir ${TMPDIR}/com.apple.IconServices (Mavericks issue) More info.

I hope that Apple will provide a real Mojave solution soon because right now my computer looks like an expensive paperweight and I am not psychologically prepared to go back to the Microsoft Windows World :-(

@MajsaM696, @igilles : Same for me. I had previously deleted all my custom icons, restoring them to defaults, and upgraded to 11.14.4, but still had similar issues of very slow CPU with RAM all eaten up by iconservicesagent. Then I wiped the Extended Attributes from the files using TinkerTool System. Now it's fixed!! Stupid MacOS Mojave. Thanks so much!!

Hi 13rendan! You can see this my post of May 30 2019:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8559574?answerId=250744164022#250744164022

You can open the Terminal and you can substitute the phrase "INSERT-PATH-NAME-HERE" in this mode:

1- Open Terminal and write:

find 

(and verify that exist a space after "find " otherwise create it)

2- With the mouse, drags in Terminal the folder or the Disk where you want to remove the customized icons

3- REMOVE the space after the path sign "/" (using Backspace or Delete key)

4- Copy end paste exactly:

* | while read f ; 
do xattr -d com.apple.ResourceFork "$f" ; 
done

5- Press Enter key

Note: My first suggestion is that you migrate to last Catalina beta version that solved this problem very well.

If your Mac is obsolete... you can verify if it support the "macOS Catalina patcher" to install Catalina. You can find the patcher site with Google, but attention to go to original site of the honest Developer dosdude1. With the MacBook Pro mid 2010 of my daughters the patcher (1.0.6 version) works well and is very simple to apply.

The EXAMPLE of the complete command is:

find INSERT-PATH-NAME-HERE/* | while read f ; 
do xattr -d com.apple.ResourceFork "$f" ; 
done

I am seeing the iconservicesagent problem, also, high CPU and RAM usage, macOS 10.14.3 (including with security update). Here is an Activity Monitor screenshot, showing the problem with Memory:

Here is one showing high CPU:

Finder becomes pretty slow, as do other things. If I kill it, it goes away for a bit, but generally comes back.

Here is what Activity Monitor is showing this afternoon. I just opened a window with movie files, and decided to just let the Finder run and see what happens. These shots were snapped without my moving windows, mouse, or anything. I just let the iMac run and watched Activity Monitor. As you can see, iconservicesagent runs up the RAM for a minute or two, then "self-corrects" and diminishes its footprint without prompting. It decrease its footprint to around 2 or 3 GB, then rises again. All the time this is happening, I have a window open with movie files and generic icons showing on the desktop. After I "intervene" and select another external hard drive with no movie files showing, and perform a few "force quits", iconservicesagent retreats and goes back to its normal footprint of 5-6 MB.

As you can see, when I ISA goes nuts, the Finder fails to respond, but becomes active when ISA drops its footprint. Regarding the icons, I get the same effect whether I use "show icon previews" or not. I use no custom icons. When I was using movie files on an external hard drive on my MBP several weeks ago, that computer's ISA would erupt and STAY in the red zone. I attribute this iMac's behavior (from which I took the snaps) to a faster CPU. I might be wrong, but who knows?

So, if any of you have ideas for a fix, I'm open to hearing any. I suspect that this is a bug in Mojave that's born from a conflict between the Finder, Spotlight, and ICA. Just my guess.

Thanks in advance for any assistance or advice.

Same Issue here. Both Macs (MacBook Pro and Mac mini) both with the same issue after installing Mojave. Never had this issue before and haven't installed anything new, on either machine, since Mojave.

The Mac mini is far worse than the MacBook Pro... 99% system resources and iconservicesagent will get to somewhere north of 80GB of memory usage before it seems to fall over and the process starts again. Memory Pressure will stay in the red. Machine is essentially unusable.

The 2017 MacBook Pro will cap at about 60% system resources and iconservicesagent will slowly inch up to 5 GB, or so. Doesn't seem to fall over but makes it impossible to do any work in anything that takes intensive resources (had two powerpoint files open on Friday and it was very slow). Finder is crazy sluggish as well.

I've been a Mac user for about 10 years now and this is the first issue like this I've had... Apple needs to fix this ASAP.

Same issue here. I have a lot of custom icons on my files. Iconservices tries to load those. The very same problem existed with High Sierra and was fixed around 6 Months after the release. I really didn't think they would make the same mistake again.

Exact same issue myself. I remember High Sierra doing this also but being fixed. It was the biggest reason I did not want Mojave. Really regret it now. Apple needs to understand this type of "issue" or "bug" actually renders users like us completely frozen out. $3,000 for an iMac that I cannot use right now. I'm back on my old Macbook Air that I left on High Sierra.

After struggling with this issue for several days and on the phone with several Apple technicians, I finally figured out the source of the problem. The process iconservicesagent loads up all the icons for folders (such as the apps folder and the home folder). The user folders do not have any icons but the O/S allows users to customize these, which is what I had done for some of my folders. Apparently, for some users after upgrading the O/S (and this is not just a Mojave problem but goes back almost a decade), the process iconservicesagent fails to find and/or load the custom icons and keep replicating itself, thereby entering an infinite loop, eventually hogging both the CPU as well as the RAM, which is what freezes and crashes the O/S.

To fix the issue, I deleted as many of the custom icons I could find on my computer and the problem seems to have finally gotten resolved. I've learned my lesson, and will never use custom icons again.

Hope this fix helps at least some of you.

You are absolutely correct, I spent a ton of time adding custom icons to my movie files (which is a very basic and core function to any OS) and am not at all happy about having to delete them. This is a pretty massive bug for such a mature company and OS and is unacceptable to linger even this long. I'm just hoping this gets someone out of the same jam I found myself in thanks to Apple. Get it together, guys.

Thanks, I3rendan... I dropped this into a text file and ran it as a shell script in terminal and got a syntax error - line 2: syntax error: unexpected end of file/. Also tried as a bash script. with the same error.

Any insight or help is greatly appreciated.

Ah, try doing it all in one line -- I added some returns in my message formatting to make it easier to read but the Terminal command won't like that so go with...

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

Thanks I3rendan - that did it for all files with the exception of .m4v files. On the .mp4 and .mkv files the images are gone... but the .m4v files are still showing cover art for the icons. Do .m4v files have a different file structure? Any ideas are greatly appreciated.