Impact of security software on system performance investigated

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Kuttz

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May 9, 2015
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Security software of one kind or another is widely regarded as a necessary evil for PC users. I remember, back in the 90s, trying out various AV solutions that had a terrible impact on my PC's performance. Things seem to have got better over the years with systems having so much more processing horsepower, lots more RAM, much faster storage and so on. Nevertheless these security suites are still using your machine's processing time – and your time – to do their checking, monitoring and updating activities.

A company called AV Comparatives has recently published a document (PDF) which compares 20 of the most well known security software solutions. The firm uses its own mix of system tasks combined with the PC Mark 8 Pro testing suite to measure the impact of AV suites on a fairly typical PC system. The system under test was an HP branded PC based around an Intel Core i5 machine with 4GB of RAM, a mechanical HDD with Windows 8.1 64-bit installed, and an internet connection active.

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http://www.av-comparatives.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/avc_per_201505_en.pdf

The AV-C score tests a PC system and measures its speed at file copying, archiving and unarchiving, installing and uninstalling applications, launching applications, and downloading files. File transcoding tests of previous years were dropped this year as the researchers thought them to be irrelevant. As mentioned above, these scores were combined with PC Mark 8 Pro results to create a new impact comparison score. The baseline system with no security software running (not even Windows Defender) was given a PC Mark Work score of 100. You can see every AV solution has an impact of at least a couple of points on this result.

With the tests in its back pocket AV Comparatives asserts that the best solutions, in terms of having the weakest impact on your PC's overall performance is Avast, followed by Emsisoft, Avira, Kaspersky and AVG. The worst performers under its assessment regime were Fortinet, Trend MICRO, Lavasoft, Quick Heal and ThreatTrack. Microsoft's own Windows Defender product was very much middle of the field.

A very important feature of the security software products not in the scope of this AV Comparatives comparison is – how effective these products are at their job. However the same company does other AV product test research and you can look up Real World Protection and File Detection tests and consider some of the findings there, if you are thinking about switching your AV solution, for example.
 

Nikos751

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Feb 1, 2013
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How reliable is this test; I doubt a little. In my opinion, Eset is lighter than avira avast and maybe emsisoft.
 

Kate_L

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It depends on system, what apps you have installed / running. I'm using Avast and I can tell you that there are better products when it comes to "performance".

I still don't trust AV-C :)
 
S

sinu

AV comparative results will not be true for every individual PC's because the AV which gives top performance in AV comparatives may not give same results at user end because of different reasons like Processors, RAM , HDD etc.
its better you to try some of AV which can match your configuration.
 

Nightwalker

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May 26, 2014
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Where's Webroot,Comodo and Norton ?

They dont participate in Av Comparatives anymore because their results would suck.

Webroot says that AV Comparatives methodology doesnt reflect its security protection (rollback + ID), Symantec only wants to be tested in Real World test (AVC doesnt allow) and Comodo is always full of excuses.

Personally I can see why Webroot and Symantec doesnt participate in Av Comparatives anymore, those tests would made the product inferior to the level that they really are (good solutions), but I cant take Comodo as a serious company.

Anyone remember BoClean episode? What about the many half baked and abandoned projects from Comodo? The distributive scanner mega fail (Comodo DACS )? The whitelist problem in the HIPS? and many many more ...


http://www.infosecisland.com/blogview/15106-The-Demise-of-the-Antivirus-Industry.html
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2887...-tool-privdog-compromises-https-security.html
 

Blackhawk

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Jun 11, 2014
149
I have on various computers Avira, Kaspersky, and Avast. I find that Avira impacts performance the least and Kaspersky is the worst. And, when I say the worst, I mean compared to the majority of AV out there so I never understand why it ranks high in this category. I do feel it offers excellent protection and has to be the best at disinfection IME.
 
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Rolo

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Jun 14, 2015
857
Where is Qihoo?

Oh, yes, they "cheated" by sending us a different configuration and telling us that they gave us this configuration specifically for this test before we ran the test and 2 months after the test, we'd remembered what they did and announced to the mass media that they cheated and we'll not test their product for a year to give time for our employers (BD, KIS, et. al.) time to not get embarrassed by a free product lest people stop subscribing to their products and go the free route instead in which case we lose our funding. Did I say that out loud?
 
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jamescv7

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Mar 15, 2011
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If I'm not mistaken, Trend Micro's components are relying much on cloud except their BB therefore resource consumption should not suffer higher.

But again the important function here where a higher specifications of your computer equivalent to same maximize level of software usage without slowdowns.

Overall use this as little reference but don't rely very much
 
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