http://forums.macrumors.com/newreply.php?do=newreply&p=20538

[QUOTE=BradHatter;20538045]How can you tell from those error/warning messages what their level is? [/QUOTE]

The Info window of Console.

[QUOTE]… Scannerz … [/QUOTE]

(Interesting software. A window to its web page has been lurking in the background here for more than a week, I also saw it in June 2013.)

[QUOTE]… IconServicesAgent using several hundred megs of memory, and it's usually about 300MB or more. … yes, it really is eating up 300MB of RAM. [/QUOTE]

Here, Activity Monitor shows that around 10 MB of real memory is used. It varies a little. Screenshots attached.

[QUOTE]… if you kill IconServicesAgent it will eventually get relaunched. [/QUOTE]

That's proper. Related:

[CODE]sh-3.2$ defaults read /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.iconservices.iconservicesd.plist
{
    Label = "com.apple.iconservicesd";
    LaunchEvents =     {
        "com.apple.dispatch.vfs" =         {
            "Monitor Low Disk Conditions" =             {
                LowDisk = 300;
                VeryLowDisk = 0;
            };
        };
    };
    MachServices =     {
        "com.apple.iconservicesd" = 1;
    };
    POSIXSpawnType = Adaptive;
    ProgramArguments =     (
        "/System/Library/CoreServices/iconservicesd"
    );
    RunAtLoad = 0;
}
sh-3.2$ [/CODE]

[QUOTE]Another thing it does is generate gigabytes of data in the /var directory. [/QUOTE]

Yes, the cache files are stored in the user's temporary directory in that area. For this cacheing technology, it's not appropriate to store the files in the home directory.

[QUOTE]If I track all the IconServicesAgent files down, it will appear that I've just given myself gigabytes of free space, but fear not…IconServicesAgent will eventually kick in and while hogging the CPU up for about an hour, it will regenerate all those files all over again [/QUOTE]

Attempting to manually clear the cache is counterproductive. It's proper for the operating system to create and make good use of this cache of files.

[QUOTE]and I'm right back where I started.[/QUOTE]

That's where you should be :)

[URL="http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/107154/com-apple-iconservicesagent-using-a-lot-of-ram-in-10-9/113552#comment169639_110586"]bmike wrote[/URL]:

[QUOTE]… Complaining about iconservicesagent doing too much is literally "shooting the messenger" - the system services provide data to apps that run. …[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE]I have no problem with some background program generating icons and storing them on disk, my problem is why is it using so many resources. We're talking over 10GB of disk space …[/QUOTE]

Usage here is around twenty percent of that figure.

[CODE]sh-3.2$ whoami ; date ; sw_vers
gjp22
Mon 29 Dec 2014 23:16:23 GMT
ProductName:	Mac OS X
ProductVersion:	10.9.5
BuildVersion:	13F34
sh-3.2$ cd $TMPDIR/../C/
sh-3.2$ du -hs com.apple.IconServices/
1.8G	com.apple.IconServices/
sh-3.2$ [/CODE]

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