Endpoint antivirus, some computers getting bogged down often

[twinstead 1]

We have endpoint antivirus on multiple computers using the remote administrator. Quite a few users (all XP boxes) are complaining that multiple times per day, at approximately the same time, their computers slow to a crawl for a period of time while the eset icon in their tray shows a scan happening. I don't have any scans scheduled during the day. Can anybody help find out what is happening?

 

 

[Marcos 5,074]

Does the slowdown occur at the time the clients receive an update? By default, a startup scan is run after an update to make sure no threat is active in memory. Are they systems with multi-core processors or what's the hw configuration?

[adam 2]

Probably not the case, but have you checked to see if there are any other antivirus programs running aside Eset. I know, because I had this issue twice this week with two clients. They installed Adobe Acrobat Reader, and it automatically installed McAfee at the same time. Caused some serious performance issues running with Eset.

 

As I said, probably not the case, but thought I'd mention it.

[kevswag 0]

Do these computers have network drives mapped? If so you want to stop the scan on network drives in advanced setup> antivirus and antisypware> real time file system protection > untick network drives. As long as you have antivirus installed on the servers/ machines that have these network drives as local drives and are doing regular scans, there should be no reason for the clients to scan them as well.

[webyourbusiness 4]

I have noticed even on dual-core machines that updates from ESET which trigger scans again are noticable - if these are even older (say pentium based) machines then the scans that are triggered are even more noticable.

 

One of the things I do on older machines is to install a junk cleaner program, such as cCleaner - I can schedule cleanups to reduce the number of windows/browser temporary files, which in turn reduces the amount of junk that ESET needs to scan.

 

I use the ESET scheduler to setup tasks to fire up cCleaner - Scheduler | Run external program | middle of the night (or any other schedule) | C:\Program Files\CCleaner\CCleaner.exe | /AUTO

 

Now this won't clear temp files from RUNNING browsers - but once you get a baseline cleaned up machine, the less that ESET is scanning after system updates, the less noticable the system impact is.... every little helps.

 

The other suggestions about ensuring that your machines are not scanning their network shares etc are all valid also - scan those files only on the machines which they are local to!

[webyourbusiness 4]

I should also note that we actively reduce the cache size for many programs - like Java (if installed) - the default allowable to these programs is ridiculously large - MS Explorer and Java are two particularly bad programs in this respect - although firefox can also grab some large amounts of disk for temporary files.

 

If you decide you want to clear out firefox temp files, you might script a batch file to run in the middle of the night - first kill off all firefox.exe files :

 

taskkill /IM Firefox.exe /F

 

then run the ccleaner program.  Firefox may open up in the "Oh, that's embarrasing" mode - possibly not after a run of cccleaner though.

Edited October 15, 2013 by webyourbusiness

[themr23 0]

The version of Eset used at my employer appears to be single threaded, making use of only 1 core, and when it is busy on a big file, everything else stalls or worse times out. Going now to look for multi-core/parallel support...

[themr23 0]

Found only 1 relevant posting here.

Ignore the Troll in this thread:

https://forum.eset.com/topic/932-multi-core-support/?hl=parallel

[themr23 0]

Called for sales support, before purchasing. Waited 20 minutes in the queue. Service rep did not know the answer. Sales Engineer not available. Promised a call back by one hour.  No call back for several hours.