iconservicesagent OS Mojave issue

I have a powerful 27” iMac BTO, purchased may 2014 with i7 CPU, 24 GB of RAM, the top graphics card, etc. So, the IconServicesAgent issue exists in all Mac with macOS Mojave of my family or my friends, news or olds Mac; for example: MacBook Pro 2017, MacBook Air 2016, iMac...

But the strange thing is this: I also have a MacBook Pro 13", mid 2010, with 16 GB RAM and a good SSD 512 MB, in which I installed Mojave 10.14.4 using Mojave Patcher (of dosdude). Strangely, the behavior with Folders containing many large files with custom icons is identical also in this Mac and the Finder freezes and restart only a little slower and almost equal to my powerful 2014 iMac.

I wonder, therefore, if the problem is really iconservicesagent or if, instead, the issue is in the Finder...

Perhaps (it’ a my idea) the Folder with the icons cache should not have been in the /Library/Cache/, but in the User_Home/Library/Cache or in the User cache in /var/folders/.

In fact, it makes no sense to use the root/Library, instead of /Users/Home/Library or /private/var/folders/user _cache_folders in 0, C, T, considering that each User accesses different folders and also considering Sandbox and ACL permissions... So! Perhaps the Finder is forced to go crazy and therefore slows down. :-(

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.

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.

I did have some custom icons, but I removed them and restored default icons, but have still continued to have the problem of others. The files are on an external drive, which as soon as I point Finder to the drive, shows iconservicesagent gradually taking up all RAM and then virtual RAM (up to 93 GB!) and then crashing my Mac. It all started after updating to Mojave. Since the update a couple of weeks ago, my computer can now open files and not freeze the desktop, but iconservicesagent still gradually consumes all RAM until the Mac crashes. So I would say it's a very, very mild improvement for me. And I seem to be the only one on this board who has removed all the custom icons and still has the problem. :(

If I dismount my external hard drive and plug it into another Mac which is still running High Sierra, everything works just fine.

It appears this has been resolved in 10.15, at least as of DP Beta 2. I just wrote up a whole detailed thing about this and my testing, but I accidentally closed out my browser window...so for now just know that it seems to be working fine in 10.15. Hopefully they bring the same fix to 10.14.6, because while 10.14.5 works better, it's still not what it used to be in 10.13 and older.

Let's hope 10.15 stays that way!

I've had this iconservicesagent problem for quite a while, and I think it started with Mojave. But I'll tell you that the problem is NOT confined to custom icons. I have no custom icons and don't want to spend my time making them up. At first, my problem began when I opened dedicated movie folders that were being used as libraries by Plex. At first, it was one library, then the problem spread to all of them, and now the problem has spread yet again to folders of movies that AREN'T libraries for Plex. I recently thought that Plex was making custom icons that sent iconservicesagent into the stratosphere. But then the problem began on non-Plex folders. If I catch it soon enough, I can stop the onslaught of the daemon if I quickly relaunch switch away from the movie folder and to another external hard drive, then relaunch the Finder. But "touching" any movie folder restarts the problem anew.

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.

You are definitely right! Mojave's IconServicesAgent is a bad process. :-( However, fortunately Catalina works perfectly both in my powerful 27" BTO (last 2013) and in my MacBook Pro 13" (mid 2010) with the excellent Catalina patcher; it works better than High Sierra and Mojave :-)

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

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.