As an update, today I included the Mountain Lion partition in the searchable volumes, and IconServicesAgent promptly went up from about 30-40M to just under 200MB.
I'm running a MacBook Pro 2,2GHz Intel core i7 with 16GB of RAM and OSX 10.9.5, and I have run into this same problem, only much worse...
Right now, not doing anything in Finder, IconServicesAgent is using 3,7GB of RAM and 6,1 GB of virtual memory. I have had this up to a virtual memory use of around 16GB and one time up to 24 GB... I had to reboot the system after that ...
The problem seems to originate in a folder with a vast amount of files (315.000 plus mostly txt, html and some pdf). These are parts of stories organised in a folder by story, and then in a folder by author. These author folders (around 15.000) are numbered and stored in a single folder.
I access these folders by named aliases, stored in another folder, totalling about 21.000 folder aliases.
Up until 2 weeks ago this whole system ran on a 2GB PowerBook G4 with OSX 10.4.11. Sometimes a little slow but no problems other than that. Due to increasing slowness the folder aliases (authornames) list over time was split up into 3 separate folders, each of around 7.000 items ...
On the new MacBook, this system however, is mostly unworkable. Accessing named aliases by typing in the first few letters of the name still works, but getting to the authorname (alias) is slow at best, and can take up several minutes if the name is very low on the list. At first the Finder then displays the names of the aliases, and it takes sometimes up to 5 or 10 minutes before the icons appear and access to the (aliased) folder is possible. Displaying the contents of that folder, then still can take many more minutes to be displayed and accessible ... Other work anywhere else in the Finder (accessing files/folders) is then not possible. Newly added files are however directly visible from Open/Save dialogs through applications.
Icon preview is switched of, but even drawing standard folder icons, seems to be a heavy burden on IconServicesAgent. And even working with this setup for a prolonged amount of time does not seem to generate/handle all the caching necessary (despite 16 GB of RAM), to allow normal operation. Access to all files/folders remains slow at best, and stalling for minutes at a time very regularly ...
Maybe I can try and get OSX 10.6 installed and see if that can handle the setup I have ... From what I gather above 10.6 does not have the IconServicesAgent software.
Any other tips anyone might have?
Hans from Holland
