iconservicesagent OS Mojave issue

You can try to delete the Icons caches that exists in /Library/Caches/

Run Terminal and digit or copy&paste:

sudo rm -rfv /Library/Caches/com.apple.iconservices.store; sudo find /private/var/folders/ \( -name com.apple.dock.iconcache -or -name com.apple.iconservices \) -exec rm -rfv {} \; ; sleep 3;sudo touch /Applications/* ; killall Dock; killall Finder

Excuse me because I writing from my iPhone and don’t permitted to insert as Code... (or I don’ t know a mode)

I'm pleased to say that Mojave 11.14.4 has finally solved the "iconservicesagent" problem with custom icons. It's still not as fast as High Sierra, especially with HD movie files, but the custom icons do appear and display without stopping the entire computer.

I'm sorry, Penguin ... but it didn't solve the problem. Furthermore... my impression is that macOS Mojave 10.14.4 now reconstructs the icons cache more frequently than 10.14.13 (once a day? ...) and when I open a folder with many large files and custom icons, in internal or external disk, I have to be patient whenever Finder tries to recreate first ALL the custom icons.

The same problem exists when I open a Finder Save window if I have to save in a non-refreshed folder that has many large files with custom icons. Also in this situation the Finder freezes!!!

I have a powerful 27 inch BTO iMac with i9 CPU, a top graphics card, 24 GB of RAM, etc.

Sigh!... I'm very disappointed with the Apple macOS Mojave developers...

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.

Thank you for this update. I've been holding off on updating Mojave for many reasons, one being information regarding custom folder/file icon functionality. It's baffling how a new OS manages to go backward in regards to simple basic functionality. With that being said, do you know how to change file previews for .mp4, .mov extensions from previewing the actual movie file (pressing play) to what it was in High Sierra having an image/icon like every other file?

Perfect, JoeCunnigham, for movie or app icons it's as you say. However I have some folders with many backup .DMG files many large, all with customized icons and it is these folders that cause a serious freezing in Finder. If I haven't yet opened these folders and, for example, I open a window with Disk Utility, maybe because I need to convert a .DMG to modify, the Finder hangs for a long time and often I have to restart it.

Obviously, I didn't have this problem with the High Sierra and the previous macOS or OS X System...

I have one very large DMG file that had a custom icon, and I remember that it suffered from the same ailment as movie files only way worse. At least with the movies, the Mac would *eventually* stop beachballing and cough up the icon. With the DMG, no. I finally had to go in via terminal and delete its resource fork so it would behave normally. I don't know if the difference was the DMG's much larger file size (compared to a typical movie), the fact that the DMG was encrypted, or both, or neither, or what. But yeah the iconservicesagent thing was way more problematic with disk images, so it doesn't surprise me that this update may yet leave DMGs in the lurch, since it *barely* solves the issue as it related to movies.

I'm not going to tell you to blow away your custom icons via terminal, because yeah, the Mac should work right and this update indicates the problem is very much on Apple's radar so it probably eventually will work right. But if you need to access the data on your disk images today (as opposed to next month or six months from now), you may need to do just that. Best of luck to you.

Dear Joe Cunningham, you are proving to be a very intelligent person, one of those people that Apple would need today, more than ever. You have fully understood well the problem! I specify that my DMG files are not encrypted, but only large, of the order of one or two GB each. Regarding folders that hangs-up the Finder, they generally contain between 50 and 100 "Xxxx.DMG" files. I'm sure if Apple had people like you, among Developers or Consultants, macOS would return to the levels of aesthetic and functional perfection in which it was with Steve Jobs. I'm sure, for example, that you, like me, don't appreciate the ugliness of the Mail.app Preference Panel. So! Do you know that I, despite being a Physician, managed to make the Mail.app Preferences, beautiful, functional, able to adapt to the personalized text in an extended way and able to maintain the uniform panels, passing from one panel to another? It was enough for me to modify only a few files, in a couple of hours. (for example: Mail.app/Contents/Resources/Base.lproj/FontsAndColorsPreferences.nib/keyedobjects.nib). But any feedback sent to Apple, however, was useless. Bye, Vincent

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.

You too say wise things, Rick, like all of us that we come from the precision and elegance to which Apple has accustomed us, since the time of macOS 9 Classic.

Regarding the fact that IconServicesAgent directly read from the "Resource Fork" of files, rather than read from the cache, I can't say but effectively the owner of the /Library/Caches/com.apple.iconservices.store folder is "_iconservices" and the privileges (permissions) assigned to "_iconservices" are reading and writing, while admin and everyone read only. (CMD+I over the folder to see). I have also tried to add to permissions the root and wheel read and write privileges and/or the permissions to me and staff, hoping to overcome an eventual bug, but to no avail.

Regarding your expectation of the System versions, better starting from the fifth update release onwards (10.x.5)... once, up to Maverick, it was like that, but not anymore today. I understood this by using the Beta versions and realizing that by now, in the final versions, there are still uglinesses that were once the prerogative of the Beta versions and corrected in the Gold Master Versions; but now, if you've noticed, for example, from Yosemite onwards we had a horrendous Disk Utility that besides having lost many essential functions to those who want to administer their System well (and lost the drag & drop on the Dock icon to create new images, etc.), up to "El Capitan" has continued to cut the names of the Devices! And now we still have the ugly and horrendous Preferences of Mail.app whose panels expand and shrink arbitrarily and above all do not adapt to the custom names of the Accounts and to other spaces in which there is personalized text. I manage many Accounts for work and family and I prefer to indicate custom names by entering the full address. Once, the space for the text of the panels adapted to the contents or I could enlarging the panel, but today it remains fixed and it creates a great uneasiness in me to search among often similar name addresses...

Unfortunately this view that there is a semi solution in Mojave latest (10.14.4) is not happening in my experience

Iconservicesagent keeps runinng up to Gb os memory consumption climbing continuously

The only solution is to reboot the Mac to reset everything but the problem recurs. Yesterday climbed to >10Gb before reboot.

This is debilitating and crushes my Mac making it unusable

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?

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. :-(

Just wanted to put another frustrated voice into this convo. I can confirm that with the 10.14.4 update that everything works relatively fine other than it taking 5-10 minutes for all of the custom icons to load. Looking at the activity monitor the iconservicesagent still eats up to 10-15 GB but it isn’t crippling my system like it was before. After all the icons load, everything works smoothly. Do you speculate that with them somewhat addressing the issue in this update that in the next one it might be resolved?

Hopefully... but from OS X 10.10 Yosemite until recently, even dragging a file into very crowded folders had become very slow... :-(

Disk Util was corrected about truncated device names, but it remains without useful features for advanced users and without the drag & drop function in the Dock... :-(

and from three or four versions of macOS the Mail.app Preferences continue to still have an interface tipical only for a beta version... :-(

However it is absurd that today the Finder has problems of slowness in some circumstances ... It seems to be back Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar, when the Finder often freezed with the colored wheel running, especially if there was another Mac on the LAN.... :-(