Do Virus Scanners Slow Down Your System?

[bartycek]

My virus scanner is the Windows cd. For the regular person, virus scanners are a scam. But business's and banks obviously need them.

 

[Guest]

What about XP? What about NOD 32?

 

[dragunover]

Average isn't the problem, for me it's when AV's start doing random crap, especially to your hard drives.
Don't tell me you haven't had an AV "decide" it's the best time to run a scan when you're in the middle of doing something. Games I play, like ARMA or Project Reality, will literally take 10x as long to load.

 

[johnnyfres]

Comodo is the best and it's free imo.

 

[husker]

[citation][nom]re-play-[/nom]this is bullshit, test playing games and make a scan in your pc while gamingwhen u will have a pain in ur a** a lot of stuttering and lag, other thing to take into accountnot everybody have a 4quad core in their pc, and less in a office enveromentso what are u testing?Antivirus software slowdown ur system like 10-20% in everything u do.[/citation]
Read the third paragraph of the article. It states the benchmarks are for when the virus scan is NOT running.

 

[Guest]

Thanks Tom's Hardware for this test. It doesn't touch all the bases but is a good starting point.

I think the most useful thing would be to re-run the tests over the next few years (using the latest versions) on the same hardware and see how much bloat the software gains over the years.

Also running the test on a lower spec PC and one that is "dirty" - ie has been used for a couple of years would be interesting - though it could be hard to get a good consistent baseline doing this.

 

[Guest]

I think them AV only affect slower PCs...

 

[searcher101]

Could someone Do The Math for me?

“It sounds worse than it feels, as those extra few seconds don’t seem all that obvious. Admittedly, that’s a subjective argument” - Is this how many people feel?

But… what if we did a summation of all of the web pages or word document opened each day. Wow, it is no longer spare change, is it? This article documents that it can easily “cost” twice as much to open a web page when an antivirus program is installed.? What if your taxes were doubled, or even your shipping costs were doubled? The masses would be outraged… lol

If we are going to do the math(does anyone have the market data to do this), I suppose there are a few incidentals we should include:

1. The value of lost time due to slower response
2. The value of bandwidth consumed by antivirus/security updates
3. The value of the incremental compute cycles used
4. The value of kilowatts consumed, I guess we need to include the kilowatts consumed because users leaves their machines “always on” just to avoid having to wait for updates to complete - just so they can read their email two or three times a week.
5. The value of admin resources spent dealing with all install/uninstall issues related to antivirus programs( have you ever had to rebuild because you didn’t turn your AV off during an install or spent extra time insuring a complete uninstall of an AV program).
6. The payroll for the antivirus companies…
7. Oh, the machines scrapped out because they can’t meet AV system requirements( do you know someone trying to justify new equipment purchases based on AV requirements…lol)

I guess the total costs would start to add up wouldn’t they? How can this not feel bad? Oh well, I guess we will never see the resources consumed plugging security holes in operating systems put to other more productive tasks. But on the upside, maybe that’s why Bill is so philanthropic, he feels guilty.

 

[RavinRivie]

Why no Avast? It's all I will use - no other scanner comes close, would have been more interested in seeing their results. Everyone I know uses Avast too.

 

[face-plants]

I agree with other readers that some more anti-virus apps would have been nice to include in this article. Avast and Avira are very popular nowadays and where is ESET NOD32 or ESET SmartSecurity? I was glad to see Kaspersky in the list but NOD32 Is one of the best anti-viruses out there without all the false-positives given by most other apps tested.

 

[bildo123]

Interesting. Now try this on a netbook and a P4/1GB/IDE machine.

Eh, if your intelligent enough you don't even really need AV on a netbook, let alone any computer. Worst cast scenario throw on MSE since it's footprint is quite small. But I'm a little biased since I do *not* like the concept/feature of netbooks.

 

[WR2]

Really useful review. Thanks for putting it together.

 

[hangfirew8]

[citation][nom]alabamer[/nom]This article is a little misleading by stating that there isn't a performance hit for the most part.It isn't until the article is over that we get the bombshell: The A/V suites aren't even doing anything during their tests![/citation]

Wrong. They are checking web pages for malicious scripts, intercepting downloads and checking them, checking programs on launch, etc.

 

[Guest]

What about Avast 4 & 5
and what about Bullguard Internet Security 10 (the best in test, see http://www.bullguard.com/why/bullguard-internet-security/av-test-results-bullguard-v10-november-2010.aspx )

 

[stone-69]

Well, It's probably right that on a modern PC the virus scanner won't slow down things noticeably. However one thing's for certain - When windows start up on my present PC (an old Athlon 64 3700) the CPU is running at 100% for some 30 seconds or so, and according to the task manager most of the load is McAfee Antivirus.
It's actually quite annoying

 

[hmh]

I am curious how antivirus software affects video capture, video editing, and rendering.

 

[Guest]

Sometimes slow downs are not immediately apparent after a restart either. Just wait a few days until mcafee has bloated from ~30MB in RAM to nearly 200MB and then start launching programs. There is no magical caching that speeds up subsequent application loads either.

 

[Guest]

Would be nice to include startup times for Java based applications like JDeveloper or SQLDeveloper. I expect you to see some noticeble performance variations. I've have some serious performance issue while running McAffee Virus suite. Luckely I got the Systems Department to exclude these folders from scanning on read access.

 

[aelfwyne]

Cannot believe you did not include Microsoft Security Essentials in this.

 

[Guest]

Excellent test!

Security software will always have some impact on certain functions in system operations. The question is not "does it have an impact?", but "how much does it impact, and what kind of operations?"

I was not surpised at the results. Pure, "Ivory Tower" tests will show little impact with today's high-powered hardware. However, in the "real world" of the average end user, some security apps will have more impact than others. This was confirmed by the Productivity Benchmark, which is closer to Real World use.

Readers should also keep in mind that these results can vary considerably on their own system. I often find that a security application will perform very well in one user environment, but will perform poorly (or intolerably) in another.

 

[werfu]

You should test it with a computer joined to an AD domain. My job laptop still run Windows XP and McAfee, which is a real PITA.

 

[frogr]

When Comcast switched from McAfee to Norton my old PC 2 Ghz Athalon went from useless to sloLenovw. Last year, when corp IT switched our Lenovo T400s to McAfee they got slow and eratic. Lately they have locked up for 10 to 60 seconds at a time. Realy sweet during presentations in meetings.

 

[Guest]

i'd like to see some test of how long it takes a system to boot with and without a/v software. it seems like the boot up slows over time as the a/v software starts up, scans something, checks for updates, downloads updates, installs updates, then says "woo woo updates have been installed". of course all the other software joins the party and does the same thing.

 

[Guest]

I fix computers for a living and have cleaned out approx 6,000 machines since the beginning myself. Up until 2003 Norton was the best and after that Norton fell sharply. I still won't use norton yet customers keep buying it and I keep removing it. WHY? It does a horrible job of detecting viruses in the real world. I laugh at tests saying it detects stuff - I dont know how they get their results but Norton hasnt been a good product since 2003. I have removed it and installed Avast and found Avast caught piles more than Norton and Malwarebytes catches more than Avast. However, I use Avast for the AV and Malwarebytes only for removing already infected machines. Kaspersky seems to be pretty good but I cant make a proper determination (2000+ customers with Avast, 6 with Kaspersky). As much as I like Avast it does seem to have problems keeping "Antivirus 2009" and those types of infections out of the computer but then again.. so does almost every other AV out there.

I have installed Avast on ALL my customers machines and everyone is happy. NO product is 100%. I still don't trust Norton YET but it seems after all these years of a crappy product they are SLOWLY fixing it. 2003-2009 their product sucked. Bloatware. Horrible boot times. However, compared to Avast Norton is horrible. Run a scan with norton. No viruses? Really? Run a scan with something else... FOUND piles of Viruses. When Norton fixes their product up more... then I'll consider them a serious contender again. And it doesnt matter which copy of Norton you use... Corporate or Home User. Horrible compared to other products. Mcaffee is also another product I would never touch and probably even lower than Norton would be Microsoft Essentials. Ugh.. where do I start? I find the free ones superior to Norton, McAfee, MS Essentials. In order.. Avast, AVG, Kasperky, and so on. Hope this helps someone.

 

[wuahn]

In my experience, McAfee made my system practically unusable. I moved to AVG for a while and now I'm recommending Microsoft Security Essentials. It seems to work well (has generated alerts) and my system never feels unresponsive.