iconservicesagent OS Mojave issue

I'm actually not sure about .m4v files, it could be that they're setup differently. For those you may have to do it the old fashioned way (opening the Info, clicking on the icon in the top-left and hitting Delete).

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.

Agree with all the comments and been living with this for a long time even prior to Mojave but appears to have returned as part of this upgrade

Pleading for a solution from Apple - I don't have a lot of custom icons that I know of and going and deleting them is not something I want to do

Mac OS used to be rock solid and I would reboot perhaps once every 6 months. Now rebooting is a priority every 1-2 days to restore memory that has been consumed by iconservicesagent - in my setup it climbs and sits at 10GB!

I can force quit but who knows what that will do long term so I reboot frequently to try and restore my MBP to a reasonable semblance of usability

I have the same experience since upgrading to Mojave. The system slows down.

I have 100GB free on my HD, and mainly use Outlook and Word and it has NEVER slowed down before, and disclosed a spinning wheel with High Sierra.

The Activity Monitor shows entries such as kernel_task, iconserviceagent, update_dyld_shared_cache, report crash....with large CPU%.

There is clearly something wrong with Mojave.

Also it won't work with Samsung SmartSwitch, and the Outlook search engine does not work (Microsoft have acknowledged this and are investigating).

Personally I fine Mojave a complete disaster and will switch back to High Sierra.

When is a bug fix planned by Apple?

I am an Apple user of macOS Classic and I am disappointed.

I have the same problem in my iMac 27 '' 2014 BTO, Intel i7 CPU, 24 GB of RAM and the best video card.

The new Apple developers are not able to program well and I think that Steve would have fired many ... Maybe they are former developers of Windows... Apple has become famous and has conquered the markets thanks to its elegance. Steve no longer be present to demand what is beautiful, ergonomic and functional.

In addition to the problem of custom icons that slow down the Macs (at least until you reorganize the cache of the folder with many custom icons), what to say, then, the very bad Mail.app Preferences that fit badly, moving from one panel to another and that truncate the names of custom accounts? It's horrible especially if, like me, users have many POP accounts to manage and use custom names to distinguish them from one another. For example: abcdefghi.abcdefghi<@>gmali.xxx - abcdefghi.abcdefghi<@>yahoo.xxx, etc.

My brand new ridiculously fast iMac beachballs forever if I open a window containing files with custom icons. I use them in my movie collection, and have done so for years. This was never a problem until Mohave. I am NOT GOING TO REMOVE hundreds of movie poster art icons, which are not hi-res images (all are 512x512), since I spent at lot of time and had a lot of fun finding them (many of them I made myself). FIX THIS ALREADY!!!

I'm having the same issue. iconservicesagent is garbage in 10.14. I have all kinds of issues with it related to sucking up RAM, freezing the Finder, distorting icons, and delays when pasting and removing icons. I'm going to try running that script to clear them out, but this makes me so many. I've been building my movie collection folder for over 10 years, spent countless time on custom icons, and now it's impossible to open the folder. Ridiculously poor job on Apple's part.

Same problem here. Have 2 copies of my movie collection, one with custom icons attached to iMac but removed custom icons from one used on Mac Mini HTPC. This restored my ability to watch them at least. My copy with custom icons is unusable, have to go into folders carefully to make any changes or iMac dies. Eagerly awaiting fix (10.14.4?) so I can use my custom icons again.

I had this problem. After working on it for the better of two weeks, I cleared the "Icon Services caches" using Cocktail 12.2.

Click on the "Files" icon. For "Choose caches" choose User. Click on the Options button and sure that Icon Services caches is selected. Then click Clear.

It was taking a long time, so I went to bed. When I woke up, no more iconservicesagent problem.

I'm sorry to disappoint you ... Your solution is only temporary ... After you've cleared the cache, Mojave has rebuilt the icon cache overnight and then the Finder can quickly open the folder. But then, continuing to use Mojave, the problem will be repeated again and again and you'll have to wait longer or... other nights to be able to view the folder contents with many large files and many custom icons. The problem is greater with external disks.

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

Clean install of Mojave. Running smoothly. Then i tried to copy a large (200GB+) movie folder from an external ssd to my home folder. It was the default movie folder from my previous High Sierra OS. Then iconservicesagent began rapidly consuming up to 160 GB of physical and virtual memory. Spinning wheels, finder unresponsive. Although I did not see any custom icons in that folder...restarted from High Sierra and copied the folder from there to Mojave. All is well now. I guess this is a bug (mentioned in other posts in this discussion) where an external movie folder contains custom preview icons. I did not use any terminal commands. If anyone has more on this, it would be welcome. I will keep an eye on activity monitor now that i'm aware.

1000% agree... What really is MOST irritating is that apart from this one issue Mojave seems be otherwise totally fine (Apart from Microphones not appearing is the Menu Bar Sound Menu - which can be fixed with 3rd party AudioSwitcher). The problem too it seems only seems to affect Custom Icons (although I could be wrong there too) but effectively, like yourself I have rather a large Video/Music Library on an External USB 3 drive and even after opening folders etc to let each load individually and populate the cache, once I disconnect and or restart the machine it all goes to hades.

As of the time of really here we're now on to 10.14.3 and this issue still persists. I'm quite sure Apple are only too aware of the problem but have done sea to resolve the issue.... I'm just wondering if the team working on this area are ex Microsoft refugees,,,,, only logical explanation for such total incompetence! I really hope Apple haven't lowered their standards to emulate such whales as the aforementioned of the likes of Corel who "acquire" perfectly good products and then destroy them (PSP for one) while charging premium for them. I believe Corel Graphics Suite is now finally back on Mac... but how long until it fails? With no support it's as good as flushing your bitcoin down the Swilly!

Same issues here (icon services hogging RAM and CPU) with different cause.

iMac late 2014 24GB RAM 10.14.3

Steps to repeat:

Activating a search (cmd-F) from a Finder window starting from "myiMac" icon and highlight "This Mac",

Select "Other" pulldown tab and use File Size.

After inserting a whatever option-value (in my case was Greater than 9 GB) Finder freezes (although had already found 57 items) and icon services start to eat RAM.

No workaround found yet.

Most people cite the custom icon thing. For me, I had a few custom icons which I reverted back to defaults, but that did not fix the issue. Maybe somehow there is still the memory of them but my external hard drive is all but nonfunctional now -- and there are no visible custom icons anymore on it.

That’s odd about the external drive still not working. I use numerous external drives with Mojave, including an 8TB that had thousands of custom icons which I removed and which became completely functional after I did so. Are you sure you removed all of the custom icons from that external drive?