iconservicesagent OS Mojave issue

I am having the same issue. A bunch of Handmade custom icons killing my finder functionality with an ungodly amount of iconserviceagent ram usage.

I tried the terminal command mentioned to try to wipe all of the icons. This didn't work for me (though I'm glad it has worked for some of you!)

Here is how I figured out how to solve it for me (and this is a very specific set of circumstances so this may not work for many of you.)

I also have my entire movie library on a Windows formatted drive that I keep plugged into my TV to watch movies from. I have Tuxera installed on my Mac which allows me to read/write to a windows drive. If I plug the drive in with Tuxera enabled I get the same issue. iconserviceagent going wild. however, if I disable Tuxera and plug in the drive (I then only have read capabilities) it functions normally, no ram usage spike, iconserviceagent doesn't even show up in the activity monitor. I then copied my library from my windows drive to my other Mac formatted drive and this process seems to have stripped the icons off. they no longer have icons and the folder no longer seizes the computer.

It's ridiculous that this is still an issue. hopefully Apple fixes it soon but this may help at least one person out in the meantime.

Had the same problem and by process of elimination I tracked it to a particular file which, when I got rid of it, solved everything. In my case it was a Veracrypt file. It did not have a custom icon or anything like that, but for some reason it triggered massive use of iconservicesagent every time I had a window open for the disk that contained the file. The only way to accomplish anything at that point was to constantly select and force quit iconservicesagent using Activity Monitor which would give me a few seconds to act before the cursor went back to spinning beach ball in the next attack.

Well, not that Apple has released macOS 10.15 Catalina, I'm allowed to report that it has fixed this issue, without Apple removing the post.

As of the last version of 10.14.6 Mohave (supplemental update 2), iconservicesagent is still broken. This means Mohave is a complete dud, unusable in the long term for anyone having this issue. It's shame though, because I'm really going to miss Dashboard, and would have probably stayed on Mohave for a long time to avoid giving up my widgets.

Anyway, Apple opted to fix iconservicesagent in 10.15 instead of trying to fix it in 10.14. What crap show that is.

I’m running Mojave on Mac mini. Connected to it are my time capsule and my WD CLOUD with a lot of movies. If I **** down both ISA does not come up. If I turn them on it eats up the entire RAM rendering my Mac mini useless. The only new change was that I upgraded to Mojave. Next - turn my WD Cloud server on but keep time capsule shut down and see what happens. Then reverse the experiment and see what happens. The one found to be at fault will face the reaper. I will update when I get a chance to do it.

I've been on this train wreck for months and have tried pretty much everything on this thread and more

Removing external drives improves things sometimes but not consistently

Creating a whole new MBP with the account transfer wizard copied the same behavior from a MBP to a MB Air (basically the same thing as a clean install and restore from Time Machine with different hardware which excludes the hardware as a cause)

I worked through 3 drive that are mounted to my MBP as follows

Day 1 - No attached drives (Veracrypt Mounted) - overnight no processes consuming memory

Day 2 - Lightening drive attached (Veracrypt mounted) - iconservicesgent up to 3.4Gb of memory in the morning

Day 3 - USB drive attached (Veracrypt mounted) - iconservicesgent no processes consuming memory

Day 4 - USB drive attached (Veracrypt mounted) - iconservicesgent no processes consuming memory

Concurrently on Day 4 mounted the Lightening Drive into my MacBook Air which was an account clone of the MBP overnight - no processes consuming memory

The MB Air clone behaves relatively normally as long as no drives are mounted

Reformatting external drives and copying back information did not solve the problem

Killing the iconserviceagent is a short term fix and it recurs over hours an the persistence fo the memory it consumes that climbs to >9Gb one morning with nothing running overnight is debilitating and unsustainable on a MBP that has max memory of 16Gb

Day to day challenges occur with frequency that brings the machines to their knees with 10 secs to open a file 13 secs to open a word document of one page - waiting 5 mins to regain control and kill everything and kill tconservicesgent restores some level of usability and enough to reboot the Mac to bring normal operations for a limited period

Rebooting has been the only viable fix and has been required up to x3 per day to keep the machines operating

A Clean system/fresh install and restore of files & account via Time Machine failed to resolve the problem

Total wipe of hard drive and fresh install of OSx and setting up the account from scratch importing no settings and going through 2 weeks of adding back most of the applications and data manually worked for a period of time but the behavior has returned with Iconservicesgent now persisting with holding Gb's of memory when left running overnight

If I have custom Icons I am not aware of them except for 2 external drives and 1 VeraCrypt Drive container icon that are custom to differentiate them visually.

Based on the above I believe I can rule out hardware faults, rule out OS corruption on my setup which leaves OSx bug that affects a small minority of users or maybe it is more but others are unaware, or have desktop machine with more memory so its impact is diminished and they just hard reboot without knowing why they have to, or they don't have attached external drives so the problem does not occur

I had detailed discussions with Apple support who guided me through the testing of the above and at the last point of contact said the next step is to bring it in as it must be hardware.

The external drives are the key problem and in my case the drive connected via Lightening which was not resolved when I wiped and reformatted it and currently it contains 1 directory and consuming <1% of the space that was in use before. The return of the behavior is not as large as before - so iconservicesagent consumes Memory and holds it forever but has not risen above 2Gb overnight so the effect appears to be proportional to the number of files and imo has nothing to do with actual custom icons. The one directory is my Mobilesync directory offloaded from the main drive using a symlink to relocate the huge backup consuming space from syncing my iPhone and iPad to my Mac and storing backups

Hope this helps someone

It's been an education trying to solve this problem with ISA. I can give you all an update. I had Mojave on two machines: a MBP and an iMac 27". ISA acted up on both of them. I moved all of my external HDs (except an MBP backup drive) to the iMac, so my problem on the MBP diminished to the point where the machine can function reasonably well, until I insert a thumb drive with media files. So with the iMac, I decided that all of the research and troubleshooting was getting me nowhere, so I decided to become a beta user for 10.15. So far, it's a good OS, IMO, but I can understand why it's called "beta." At least there are no ISA problems, from the short time I was using it. The reason that I got off beta is that 10.15 is pure 64 bit. I've got good old Aperture for my extensive photo collection, and won't go to Lightroom for a replacement, so I tried two other photo editing/cataloguing apps. Now it's time to write, "Ooops", because what I didn't know is that the app software developers for these photo apps haven't engineered anything for 10.15, so I was caught in no-man's land and can't work on the photos when in 10.15. (No, Photos isn't the panacea.) Well, I wasn't about to downgrade to Mojave again and go batshit with ISA, so I downgraded further to High Sierra. Of course, there are continuing problems with moving between 3 OSs (music files got mislabeled and misplaced, for instance. And my backup drive on the iMac only went back to about a week before the 10.15 beta upgrade, so I had to hurry with Time Machine, but I'm slowly straightening them out. High Sierra doesn't show the ISA problems I had with Mojave, so in the short term, that's my fix.

But going to 10.15 will bring on more software issues because of the complete conversion to 64 bit. It will cost money to get third party photo software, but I suppose it's better than staying with an OS that will become obsolete in the near future.

OT: I called Apple support yesterday and was on the phone with them for nearly 4 hours. I was under the weather so I could afford the time. My issue was that, once I downgraded to High Sierra, I couldn't get my Mail app to add my long time third party email account. I went through 4 tech support folks, two of whom were "senior tech" people, and the only solution was that I had to use the email service provider's webmail. No one could guide me through to a solution using the Mail app on High Sierra. The last person efficiently guided me through using another user account so I could get email, but it's another hassle to switch user accounts to retrieve email. The first tech support person was nearly insisting that I upgrade to Mojave, even after I told him about the ISA problems. I'll stop there. I don't want to upset the moderator. It was a long day.

BTW, thank you all for your replies and your posts.

I give you all TWO good news! The first news is that I have installed the Catalina Public Beta and finally the incoservicesagent problem has been solved!

But ... now, before opening any window, Finder waits to load all the items. So! If a folder have many items (with or without customized icons) the items appear after few seconds.

At this point ... the second good news is that the latest version 7.41 of TinkerTool (free) has the option for the Finder: << Collect all data first before beginning to display folder contents >> and I disabled the box because I prefer to see the items as the Finder loads them.

Enjoy

I had the same issue. All began with me installing Mojave. First I tried buying more memory. But iconsevicesagent just consumed the extra memory plus tons of virtual memory. On my 32 GB RAM iMac, it takes up 110 GB of RAM at times! But it only seems to happen after I point the Finder window to my external hard drive. I read other posts that also said the problem an external hard drive.

Next I tried changing the few custom icons I had within that external hard drive back to default. Didn't help. Then I removed all the custom icons from my iMac internal hard drive. No help.

If I plug my external hard drive into my MacBook Pro, it works fine. I have not upgraded its OS yet and is still running High Sierra. If I use its Finder to access the files on the external hard drive, iconservicesagent behaves normally.

Wish I could uninstall Mojave, but I do not have a HS backup, and I hear that it's now risky to try to go back. So I'm stuck not being able to use my external hard drive much on my main computer until hopefully Apple releases some new OS fix.

Holy ****!

You just saved me from buying a new $3000 MBP. My finder went insane when accessing a SD card on my old but reliable MBP mid 2009. The problematic files were large > 2 GB disk image files.

There were several files with custom icons or special file flags. I used TinkerTool System 6“ to remove all flags on all files on the SD card and kernel_task / iconservicesagent shut the ******* and I can use my MBP again.

Thank you so much!

You can delete the Resource Fork of this folder with a Terminal command, as indicated in precedent messages.

I copy here to help you :-)

The only real solution must provide Apple, restoring the correct operation of the Resource Fork. In this regard, the solution provided by another user to delete the Resource Fork through the Terminal is a permanent solution valid but, unfortunately, eliminating the Resource Fork, you delete the previews of images, videos, PDFs and other files created by Finder and then it is almost impossible to get them back. To do this, in some cases, you can use an application like GraphicConverter, select all the photos and with the right mouse choose to rebuild the EXIF ​​Preview.

Although I do not recommend doing so, however, I tell you the command to copy in Terminal to solve the problem of opening folders to those of you who fail with other methods. Remember to replace the correct path name of the folders that interest you instead of 'INSERT-PATH-NAME-HERE'. Keep in mind that the command also deletes the Resource Fork sub-folders!

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

Yes, yes :-) macOS Catalina solved the iconservicesagent issues. I suggest you to register to Apple site for the Beta Pubblic testers, to enroll your Mac and to install Catalina. Today Apple released the Beta 6. Bye :-)

I use Path Finder which has an option to temporarily deactivate the custom icons in a folder full of files then restore them whenever you want. I’ve deactivated my 2000 custom icons and will reactivate them when I upgrade to macOS Catalina.

Actually, in my case, the Penguin is correct (though the victory dance is premature). I feel sorry that, for whatever reason, Dott. Enzo_Vincenzo still has the problem after applying the upgrade. The overall problem is not completely fixed by the update, but now when I open a folder full of movies with custom icons there is no beachball, I can select-move-copy files, most importantly I can immediately open a movie and play it. So the entire computer being hogtied got fixed. What did NOT get fixed is the Mac's ability to immediately display all the custom icons, all at once, upon opening the folder - like in High Sierra (and every other Mac OS before Mohave). On my 4.2 GHz core i7 iMac the generic movie icons change into the custom icons one at a time, about one per second. So if you have a lot of movies in the folder it will take an unacceptably long time before you can see them all. This is still terrible performance, and the Apple coders responsible for this part of the OS should not feel like they licked it with Mojave 11.14.4. Rather they should remain embarrassed and should be still working feverishly to restore full, proper functionality to something so basic to the Finder.

It looks like what some others have said, 10.14.4 partially resolves the issue for me. I say partial, because opening a directory with a lot of custom icons no longer freezes up the Finder and my systems, but it takes a few minutes while the system retrieves and displays the icons. I'm sure this is a temporary fix until they fully resolve the issue. My guess is iconservicesagent is probably reading the data in real time instead of reading from a cache.

I know OS development is a large and complicated task with many parts and many hands, but this shouldn't have gone out like this. It shows that Apple is rushing to get new systems out, that they're not doing proper testing, they don't care about certain segments of their user base, or a combination of these. I feel that yearly OS cycles have been devastating to Apple's overall quality. New OSes are released at a predetermined date, instead of when they're ready. Professionally, I don't let me end users update to a new system until the 10.XX.2 or 10.XX.3 release, which is a good 3-5 months after the system is release, almost half is lifetime. Maybe yearly cycle works for phones, but not for full fledge computers.

Sorry to hear that. I was experimenting today, opened a folder with a few hundred custom icons, it took maybe 5-10 minutes for the system to display all the custom icons. In that time, iconservicesagent ran up about 8.5GB of RAM. For me, this wasn't horrible because I have a Mac Pro with 64GB of RAM, but I imagine my laptop with 16GB would have been completely useable. Are you on a computer with 16GB or less?