Forum Moderators: phranque
Sometimes it'd be fine if I was mistaken with stuff like this.
But surely, CPU usage peaked at 100% and I had to abandon the idea of saving time this way.
to cut a long story short, it wasn't the networking tasks, neither the mass-editing of static HTML files, nor the media-rich stuff I was browsing in the meantime, not even the video that was playing in the background *grin*
It was the anti-virus monitoring.
I was like... what?!
It eats up 66-75% of the CPU time because of scanning everything and anything I do, realtime. Ugh. I disconnected the network, and turned it off to do the offline editing fast. Couple of thousands of HTML pages, not a big deal.
And then my jaw dropped... the lil' computer was finished with the stuff in less than one fifth of the time it'd have taken. Ok, ok, I was holding back with the other tasks, but still. And this box isn't THAT much of a weakling either.
...
Ok, so...
What's your estimate, how much of YOUR time the AV scanning eats up while doing heavy multitasking? It slows down applications both on and offline... but once connected to the net you can't afford to turn it off.
Maybe I'm not using the best software out there, I don't know.
But I'm pretty satisfied with the protection it provides.
I'll try to turn off some features that scan stuff I myself generate offline, and see what happens.
But this one made me think.
I mean surely I could run out to buy an 8 core CPU and see if the performance gets any better, but if a single setting or better AV software can save me my time all the same, I'd rather not.
The tasks ran for 5 minutes instead of 20-30.
And that difference, projected to a longer peroid may mean significant changes in productivity... to me at least.
What AV software are you using for terminals/boxes you work with?
...
It eats up 66-75% of the CPU time because of scanning everything and anything I do, realtime.
Let me guess. Norton or MacAfee, right? :-)
I've worked with both of these on two platforms since the Mac Classic OS 5.0 days. Especially Norton, which worms it's way into your system and can create nightmares when things go wrong.
I've used Grisoft AVG Free Home edition for years, lightweight, never had a problem, it's like it's not even there. The task manager icon spins up whenever I visit pages or mail comes in, that's about it.
To give your software the benefit of the doubt - it really shouldn't be performing a scan whenever you do something locally. Perhaps there's a configuration somewhere that you can turn off, you really only need to scan incoming data and perform a daily full system scan.
Kaled.
