iconservicesagent OS Mojave issue

Good to know. Thank you.

We shouldn't have to do a workaround for this, but glad to know one.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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?

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...

@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!!