Yosemite Swapping to Disk?

[culb0743]

I upgraded to 10.10 a couple of days ago and have noticed that I always seem to see swap being used in Activity Monitor. Memory Pressure is always green, but I'm seeing Swap being used like ten minutes after a cold boot with only 1 app (Safari) open. All other readings, i.e., Wired Memory, App Memory, File Cache, Compressed Memory, Virtual Memory, etc. don't stand out as being any different than they were under 10.9. Even thought the Swap has always read less than 50 Mb, I find it kind of odd as with 10.9 Swap stayed consistently at zero after weeks and months of uptime. I'm using a 15" rMBP with 8 Gb of RAM. Performance (aside from the occasionally janky animation hiccups) seems fine in all other respects. I'm not using RAM intensive apps, just a text editor, mail, and a browser most of the time. Anyone know why this may be happening? Is 8 Gb not enough anymore?

 

[Shazaam!]

No 8 GB isn't enough to avoid page outs. In fact you'll also get them occasionally with 16 GB.

 

[chabig]

8GB is great. Nothing you described is cause for concern.

 

[w0lf]

No 8 GB isn't enough to avoid page outs. In fact you'll also get them occasionally with 16 GB.

That's rubbish especially for what OP claims to be doing (just using Safari).

 

[chabig]

For comparison, I'm running Safari, Mail, iTunes, Finder, and Parallels 10 (with IE and Excel open). I have 8GB in my 11" Air and my swap used is zero. However, to me 50MB is the same as zero and I wouldn't worry about it.

 

[h9826790]

That's normal on Yosemite. Even though Mavericks may have something like 200MB swap for no reason on some Mac.

I have 32G RAM, and still can have SWAP or memory compression for no apparent reason.

 

[culb0743]

Ok, after multiple restarts throughout the day, I'm noticing a process called "iconservicesagent" quickly growing in size. Exactly one hour after a cold boot, "iconserviceagent"it has ballooned to half a Gb. All I've done is run Activity Monitor and use the Webkit browser to check MacRumors. The MacBook was sleeping for like 30 minutes. Earlier in the day, I researched "iconservicesagent" and found users seeing similar behavior in 10.9.0, last year. The recommended fix, (kill the process in Activity Monitor, delete com.apple.finder, empty trash, kill the finder, and log out) doesn't seem to do anything. As does neither repairing permissions or trimming some of the start up items from my user account. And this behavior was identical under Safari, I'm only using Webkit to see if it made any difference, because I've only been using Activity Monitor and a browser most of the day. I haven't opened mail at all and only occasionally open a text editor (iA Writer), make a note, and close the app. What in the heck does "iconserviceagent" do?

EDIT: I just killed "iconserviceagent" and watched my memory pressure drop by 10-12%.

 

[chabig]

What in the heck does "iconserviceagent" do?

Obviously it's doing something with icons. Unless you're an operating system engineer you would do well to stay away from Activity Monitor and stop messing with stuff you don't understand. If you go around killing random processes, I think you're more likely to cause harm. Leave the system alone to work as designed.

 

[h9826790]

Since you just install Yosemite few days ago. I suspect your Mac may still doing some optimisation in the background (e.g. indexing). As long as your Mac function normally. Better not to touch those system process.

 

[w0lf]

And this behavior was identical under Safari, I'm only using Webkit to see if it made any difference, because I've only been using Activity Monitor and a browser most of the day. I haven't opened mail at all and only occasionally open a text editor (iA Writer), make a note, and close the app. What in the heck does "iconserviceagent" do?

It looks like some kind of icon cache manager.

You can see what it's accessing by highlighting it in terminal clicking the i then going to 'Open Files and Ports'. Pretty much exclusively uses '/Library/Caches/com.apple.iconservices.store/'.

Don't really have any idea what's causing the issue though. Good luck fixing it.

 

[simonsi]

What in the heck does "iconserviceagent" do?

EDIT: I just killed "iconserviceagent"

You should re-title this thread "Help, My Mac won't boot"....you'll get there at some point with that approach.