com.apple.IconServices taking up large amounts of disk space - why? Why does com.apple.IconService take up a lot of MB on the Activity Monitor?
I'm aware this is a new feature, from 10.9 onwards.

I Googled solutions to this, but haven't found anything that works... yet.

I don't want to downgrade OS X, but I am interested to know why this happens

com.Apple.IconServicesAgent uses 140.9 MB, and on the hard drive, the folder /var/folders/randomstring/C/com.apple.IconServices takes up 127.5 MB, although this could grow.

My hard drive is 319.21 GB and I have 284.69 GB left, but it was 284.82 last night (no new apps installed or uninstalled, only some temp files/caches deleted), so I'm not sure if this is part of the problem.

Fixed disk permissions as suggested on some Mac sites; no major issues to report.

Is there a way to keep it manageable without losing the icons off the desktop or menu (I did used to delete the folder, killall Dock, killall Finder, restart when I first learnt about com.apple.IconServices).

I had a look on Apple's website, other people are having the same issue but there doesn't seem to be a solution to this. (I'm not that confident with things like Terminal apart from sudo deletion of trash, but that's as far as it goes!!)

All help is much appreciated.
To be frank, I wouldn't worry too much about it. You have plenty of space left. My IconServices folder was about 4 GB large and I had 3 GB of space left on my 160 GB SSD.

I can't tell you why Apple is creating or caching those files on OS X, sadly it seems to be a kind of mystery. I wasn't able to find out anything.

Anyway, after booting my Mac in safe mode (holding down the shift key on startup until the progress bar appears) and then booting up again, I ended up with 13 GB of free space. Try this to free up more space.