Serious Discussion Do You Prefer Antivirus Software Lighter on CPU, Memory or Disk?

[brambedkar59]

And do you measure all thing by feeling, or you use a specific tool to measure it?

Measuring FPS, download/browsing speed and unused RAM is easy. Measuring program launch speed is a bit tricky, but you can easily tell if an AV is causing program to take double the time to launch.

 

[mlnevese]

As long as the system does not feel as if it's running in slow motion, I really don't care how much cpu/ram, etc. it's using.

I don't worry about performance that has a difference measure in milliseconds No human would even notice it anyway.

When I'm using a computer, I want my software to be responsive.

 

[Divine_Barakah]

ignore what others find

If we always ignore the experiences of other, MT wouldn't exist. It is true that the same product can behave differently on different systems, but this does not in any way mean we should ignore what others find. We should take that into account while we also try and find out by ourselves.

BTW should we ignore that u said Emsisoft I'd snappy?

Don't really worry about it, most of the time the difference is minimal and you can't see it anyways. If you run tests that tell you something is 6 ms faster does it really matter?

Not necessarily, some products are really heavy like Checkpoint NG. I also had mixed results with G Data and Bitdefender. Some product do cause a noticeable system slowdown

 

[Trident]

Not necessarily, some products are really heavy like Checkpoint NG.

In the next few months, performance improvements are the main focus. With 88.50, the core framework was updated to 4.7.2 which is a huge boost from 3.5. Several components are now GPU-accelerated, including the static analysis and UI. Additional improvements will be made during the course of the next few months, with final memory reduction in 88.80. The improvements will affect ZoneAlarm too.

 

[Kiss]

I use Novabench to check the performance score of systems with antivirus installed, in my test, the best and fastest for my system was Microsoft Defender, my games and browsing are fast, and as it has good protection, I'm satisfied

 

[tofargone]

Look, security products perform differently on different systems and configurations.
In my experience Avast/AVG are the lightest. MB slows my system a bit. Norton was light too. Trend Micro was average.

Emsisoft slowed down File explorer (and even caused it to crash) and file copying.

Your results are identical to mine, concerning avast, MB, and avg

 

[cartaphilus]

I know that the most important factor for antivirus software is protection, then usability for some, but when it comes to performance factor, do you prefer it to be lighter on CPU, memory or disk?

Yes

 

[Captain Holly]

I prefer an AV that is lighter on CPU. My daily driver laptop has 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD so I have plenty of memory and there is hardly anything on my SSD so that's not an issue either. I just don't like it when one AV/program or another slows my computer down. At the same time I don't want to sacrifice security either so I have tried to find the happy medium. I stopped using Linux about 6 weeks ago. Not sure if I will ever go back to Linux either. I am on Windows 11 23H2 again now and started out with WD by itself on all default settings. Then I added my old lifetime MBAM Premium license with the MB Browser Guard extension in Edge and Firefox. FF ran OK like that but Edge slowed down really bad. As a process of elimination to solve the problem I first removed the browser guard. That helped a little but my laptop really snapped back to normal after I removed the entire MBAM app. I am using the free Avast One Basic now. Avast uses less than half the RAM that MBAM did, the laptop is really quick no matter which browser I use and CPU usage is way down too. I don't use FF enough for it to make much difference but I do still use MB Browser Guard in FF. I think I have a very good balance between speed and security now. I probably would have been ok with just WD but I wanted something stronger than WD by itself.

C.H.

 

[Divine_Barakah]

I prefer an AV that is lighter on CPU. My daily driver laptop has 16GB of RAM and a 1TB HDD so I have plenty of memory and there is hardly anything on my HDD so that's not an issue either. I just don't like it when one AV/program or another slows my computer down. At the same time I don't want to sacrifice security either so I have tried to find the happy medium. I stopped using Linux about 6 weeks ago. Not sure if I will ever go back to Linux either. I am on Windows 11 23H2 again now and started out with WD by itself on all default settings. Then I added my old lifetime MBAM Premium license with the MB Browser Guard extension in Edge and Firefox. FF ran OK like that but Edge slowed down really bad. As a process of elimination to solve the problem I first removed the browser guard. That helped a little but my laptop really snapped back to normal after I removed the entire MBAM app. I am using the free Avast One Basic now. Avast uses less than half the RAM that MBAM did, the laptop is really quick no matter which browser I use and CPU usage is way down too. I don't use FF enough for it to make much difference but I do still use MB Browser Guard in FF. I think I have a very good balance between speed and security now. I likely would have been ok with just WD but I wanted something stronger than WD by itself.

C.H.

Yes in my experience MB is a bit heavier than Avast.

 

[Captain Holly]

I should add here I made a mistake in my reply, my laptop has an SSD, not an HDD. It originally did have a hard drive but about 4 months ago I swapped it out for a Lexar 1TB SSD. I also replaced the original 8GB RAM with a Timetec 16GB stick. Both parts work great together. I then put that old 8GB stick in the second RAM slot on my old Toshiba laptop. It had only 4GB to begin with, now it has about 10.5 GB of useable memory. I also added a 512 GB SSD to the Toshiba. It works fine, it still has Linux on it but don't use that laptop very often. I may reinstall Windows 10 on it just to tinker around a bit.

C.H.

 

[Harputlu]

Your results are identical to mine, concerning avast, MB, and avg

Your results are identical to mine, concerning avast, MB, and avg

When I used Avg with adguard (paid), it slowed down my system.
I use k7 Ultimate Security and Hitman pro alert on my computer. I haven't encountered a problem right now. But let me tell you that if you are playing games and the game uses easy antichat as a copy protection, Hitman is constantly blocking it.

 

[Trident]

Norton used to be very light on everything. Low memory usage, low CPU activity, low disk usage, pretty much no slowdowns. Unfortunately, as Symantec engines are going away, it now has a sheer number of processes, just like Avast. Optimisations are gone.

 

[lokamoka820]

I prefer an AV that is lighter on CPU. My daily driver laptop has 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD so I have plenty of memory and there is hardly anything on my SSD so that's not an issue either. I just don't like it when one AV/program or another slows my computer down. At the same time I don't want to sacrifice security either so I have tried to find the happy medium. I stopped using Linux about 6 weeks ago. Not sure if I will ever go back to Linux either. I am on Windows 11 23H2 again now and started out with WD by itself on all default settings. Then I added my old lifetime MBAM Premium license with the MB Browser Guard extension in Edge and Firefox. FF ran OK like that but Edge slowed down really bad. As a process of elimination to solve the problem I first removed the browser guard. That helped a little but my laptop really snapped back to normal after I removed the entire MBAM app. I am using the free Avast One Basic now. Avast uses less than half the RAM that MBAM did, the laptop is really quick no matter which browser I use and CPU usage is way down too. I don't use FF enough for it to make much difference but I do still use MB Browser Guard in FF. I think I have a very good balance between speed and security now. I probably would have been ok with just WD but I wanted something stronger than WD by itself.

C.H.

Thank you for your detail answer, but I have a question: why Avast One Basic, not Avast Free?

 

[lokamoka820]

Norton used to be very light on everything. Low memory usage, low CPU activity, low disk usage, pretty much no slowdowns. Unfortunately, as Symantec engines are going away, it now has a sheer number of processes, just like Avast. Optimisations are gone.

I noticed that recently with V24.

 

[lokamoka820]

When I used Avg with adguard (paid), it slowed down my system.
I use k7 Ultimate Security and Hitman pro alert on my computer. I haven't encountered a problem right now. But let me tell you that if you are playing games and the game uses easy antichat as a copy protection, Hitman is constantly blocking it.

Me too, it was because both of them scan for HTTPS in the same time.

 

[Divine_Barakah]

When I used Avg with adguard (paid), it slowed down my system.
I use k7 Ultimate Security and Hitman pro alert on my computer. I haven't encountered a problem right now. But let me tell you that if you are playing games and the game uses easy antichat as a copy protection, Hitman is constantly blocking it.

Avg and adguard have incompatibility issues

 

[bazang]

In this day if CPU, RAM, or storage disk size is even a consideration when selecting security software then the issue is not the software, but the system itself.

Time to buy a more capable computer.

 

[mlnevese]

In the next few months, performance improvements are the main focus. With 88.50, the core framework was updated to 4.7.2 which is a huge boost from 3.5. Several components are now GPU-accelerated, including the static analysis and UI. Additional improvements will be made during the course of the next few months, with final memory reduction in 88.80. The improvements will affect ZoneAlarm too.

You got me curious. Is it being tested on notebooks with dedicated GPUs? They tend to get quite hot when the dedicated GPU is in use.

 

[Trident]

You got me curious. Is it being tested on notebooks with dedicated GPUs? They tend to get quite hot when the dedicated GPU is in use.

It is not extreme usage. On my dell laptop with Intel Iris XE and 11th gen Core i5, the UI consumed 4% GPU (under 3D) and about 2-3% CPU time. Prior to the optimisation, during scan, the UI consumed >10% CPU which was more than 1/2 of the resources used by the scanner. The scanner process is limited to 20%.

Static analysis uses 48 concurrent CPU threads + 16 GPU threads (light GPU acceleration), which comes with the gradient-boosted ML. It was disabled before in configuration, but now as of 88.50, it has been enabled. It also draws few percent of the GPU.

 

[monkeylove]

See also tests like

Performance Test April 2024

Performance Test April 2024 for Microsoft Windows 10 security products released, 16 products' impact on system performance was tested.

www.av-comparatives.org