App Review Emsisoft Anti-Malware quick review

[SeriousHoax]

It's true that there's barely any AV that's as light as ESET and when you disable HTTPS scanning it uses even less CPU than Windows Defender in most cases while browsing the web. But the ram usage value it shows on task manager isn't the actual value. Here on my system the task manager shows it's using 66 mb. But I don't think any modern AV that's not 100% cloud based can really perform all of its task using 66mb ram only.

Don't need to use any third party apps. Simply open Windows's Resource Monitor and check memory usage. Here it nicely explains what this different values of ram means.

From what I understand, here the Working Set value is the real amount of ram that's actually being used by ESET at the moment. The task manager value matches the Private Bytes value here. I have few apps running in the background with some downloading going on via IDM. If I close these running apps then the usage would be lower.
BD based AV's signature are bigger, so they consume more ram, but I see you have 32gb ram with plenty of free ram available. So the AV using 500-600 mb ram shouldn't bother you. 1.7gb is of course abnormal. Bitdefender nowadays is one of the lightest AV but maybe that's not the case for Emsisoft. I also had some performance issue with it in the past, and I'm someone who doesn't like its Default setting which scans files on execution only. I like to know as soon as a malware reaches my disk.

 

[Dex4Sure]

It's true that there's barely any AV that's as light as ESET and when you disable HTTPS scanning it uses even less CPU than Windows Defender in most cases while browsing the web. But the ram usage value it shows on task manager isn't the actual value. Here on my system the task manager shows it's using 66 mb. But I don't think any modern AV that's not 100% cloud based can really perform all of its task using 66mb ram only.
View attachment 254136
Don't need to use any third party apps. Simply open Windows's Resource Monitor and check memory usage. Here it nicely explains what this different values of ram means.
View attachment 254139
From what I understand, here the Working Set value is the real amount of ram that's actually being used by ESET at the moment. The task manager value matches the Private Bytes value here. I have few apps running in the background with some downloading going on via IDM. If I close these running apps then the usage would be lower.
BD based AV's signature are bigger, so they consume more ram, but I see you have 32gb ram with plenty of free ram available. So the AV using 500-600 mb ram shouldn't bother you. 1.7gb is of course abnormal. Bitdefender nowadays is one of the lightest AV but maybe that's not the case for Emsisoft. I also had some performance issue with it in the past, and I'm someone who doesn't like its Default setting which scans files on execution only. I like to know as soon as a malware reaches my disk.

Well I checked ESET memory use just now with Process Explorer.

Private bytes on the left, working set on the right. But yeah you're right when SSL scanning is turned off from ESET it's really as light as it gets. Its not just the RAM usage though, ESET uses very little CPU as well. Windows Defender is light too, except when it comes to file transfers. There it is rather heavy.

 

[Cortex]

I've never had Emsisoft use extreme amounts of RAM, it's always been pretty light too - I first used it when it was A Squared.

 

[gery79]

emsisoft has become heavy....i lost interest on it when they removed the good onlinearmor fw ....

 

[Venustus]

It's true that there's barely any AV that's as light as ESET

Maybe Webroot..

 

[Local Host]

It's true that there's barely any AV that's as light as ESET and when you disable HTTPS scanning it uses even less CPU than Windows Defender in most cases while browsing the web. But the ram usage value it shows on task manager isn't the actual value. Here on my system the task manager shows it's using 66 mb. But I don't think any modern AV that's not 100% cloud based can really perform all of its task using 66mb ram only.
View attachment 254136
Don't need to use any third party apps. Simply open Windows's Resource Monitor and check memory usage. Here it nicely explains what this different values of ram means.
View attachment 254139
From what I understand, here the Working Set value is the real amount of ram that's actually being used by ESET at the moment. The task manager value matches the Private Bytes value here. I have few apps running in the background with some downloading going on via IDM. If I close these running apps then the usage would be lower.
BD based AV's signature are bigger, so they consume more ram, but I see you have 32gb ram with plenty of free ram available. So the AV using 500-600 mb ram shouldn't bother you. 1.7gb is of course abnormal. Bitdefender nowadays is one of the lightest AV but maybe that's not the case for Emsisoft. I also had some performance issue with it in the past, and I'm someone who doesn't like its Default setting which scans files on execution only. I like to know as soon as a malware reaches my disk.

That process alone is using 67MB, not one MB more, the rest of the working set comes from shared processes at 211MB.

Plus, I've seen Kaspersky running multiple times at 40MB, so is even lower than ESET with no performance impact on my system.

 

[SeriousHoax]

That process alone is using 67MB, not one MB more, the rest of the working set comes from shared processes at 211MB.

Plus, I've seen Kaspersky running multiple times at 40MB, so is even lower than ESET with no performance impact on my system.

I see. Adding the value of shared + private equals to the Working set. There's also another value in Resource Monitor named Commit. This value is equal to the Private Bytes value of Process Explorer but Resource Monitor's Private Bytes is 10mb less.
I've seen ESET using as low as 28 MB many times. Kaspersky's main complaint is internet browsing slowdown. Otherwise, no impact is noticeable in other tasks. The CPU usage is on the higher side while browsing and above average while launching apps.
Anyway, that's off-topic.

 

[Divine_Barakah]

This is Bitdefender Total Security in one of my computers. If EMSISOFT it using over 1gb of RAM there's something clearly wrong with it.



View attachment 254115

I am sorry to let you know that BD in some cases used more than 1.2 GBs of RAM on my laptop and other faced the same issue too. You can see user complaining on Reddit.

 

[Divine_Barakah]

Not just in task manager, I could hear the CPU fan ramp up and the applications simply launched slower than usual.

This happened to me while I was using BD. Enabling automatic profiles in BD helped a bit, but I could always hear the fan of my laptop. This does not happen with AVG, Trend Micro and K7 and F-Secure.

 

[Divine_Barakah]

Have a look at this. This must be a memory leak issue.

 

[Venustus]

emsisoft has become heavy.

I found it light when I used it last time..Every AV is system dependent..

Have a look at this. This must be a memory leak issue.

In this case yes indeed or a software incompatibility
On my machine BD uses a maximum of 160MB...I will try to post a screenshot later on
Cheers!

 

[Dex4Sure]

Have a look at this. This must be a memory leak issue.

Yup so I was right all along suspecting its the BugDefender engine being buggy as usual Honestly that is exactly why I keep bashing Bitdefender and refuse to use products with their engine. Naturally there's not much Emsisoft can do about the fact Bitdefender engine has some terrible bugs.

You can't blame the performance hog all on Bitdefender, @Dex4Sure.

Oh yes, I actually can. Especially now with more proof!

 

[Venustus]

and refuse to use products with their engine

While I respect your opinion I must beg to differ...I do not get the performance hit with any BD engineered product...Having said that they do have one of the best AV engines on the market
Cheers!

 

[Dex4Sure]

While I respect your opinion I must beg to differ...I do not get the performance hit with any BD engineered product...Having said that they do have one of the best AV engines on the market
Cheers!

Do you actually actively measure resource usage? Also, do you multitask a lot or otherwise run any heavy workloads? In light usage scenario, most AV's don't show up to be performance hogs. Its only when you got multiple things running at the same time you start to see which AVs are truly light, and which are heavy.

I respectfully disagree with BD engine being one of the best on the market. First of all, they have quite a bit more false positives than ESET or Kaspersky (which admittedly are the best in this respect). Secondly, their detections are not as clear as many others. For instance, with Kaspersky or ESET you get a good idea if the detection was adware or malware and even what kind of adware or malware. With Bitdefender, not so much. Mostly all you get is generic trojan or gen variant even if the detection was adware. The detection descriptions are much more precise with some other products.

My first encounter with Bitdefender long ago (years ago) didn't leave me exactly impressed either. It literally quarantined official Spotify client as a trojan generic

 

[Venustus]

Do you actually actively measure resource usage? Also, do you multitask a lot or otherwise run any heavy workloads?

Yes I do...I also game quite a bit...Never had an issue with BD...I think it all boils down to system specific configurations.
Anyway, every one is entitled to their opinion
Cheers!

 

[Divine_Barakah]

In my experience products that used BD engine worked better that BD itself. For example Bullguard and G Data are much lighter in my experience than BD is. BD updates kill the system for much CPU and Ram is used in the process. Let us not forget the high resources usage during system startup. I am not bashing BD and I do like it, but it is not as light as they market it to be. I have a one year license for BDTS and am not using it.
It would be nice if they move their sigantures to the cloud.

 

[Dex4Sure]

Yes I do...I also game quite a bit...Never had an issue with BD...I think it all boils down to system specific configurations.
Anyway, every one is entitled to their opinion
Cheers!

Well yeah good for you if it works well. For me, never had any luck with them. I do think it boils down to also what you actually do on the computer. If its a lot of copying large files etc certain AVs are much heavier than others in those tasks. Then others slow down browsing by default due to HTTPS scanning.

 

[Venustus]

In my experience products that used BD engine worked better that BD itself.

I would agree with you...
The problem with BD is that it can be buggy at times

 

[mlnevese]

I'm currently using Bitdefender in 8 computers, rangig from a second generation i3 to a 9th i7, memory ranging from 4gb to 16gb. I basically have 0 impact in all of them. I can say the same about Kaspersky, btw, tested in all of them.

I never had this behavior on any of my machines. There's clearly an incompatibility between Bitdefender and something installed in the machines.

 

[Divine_Barakah]

I'm currently using Bitdefender in 8 computers, rangig from a second generation i3 to a 9th i7, memory ranging from 4gb to 16gb. I basically have 0 impact in all of them. I can say the same about Kaspersky, btw, tested in all of them.

I never had this behavior on any of my machines. There's clearly an incompatibility between Bitdefender and something installed in the machines.

When I used BD I used it a newly installed Windows 10 Pro. My laptop is used for studying and I did not have anything installed but Koofr cloud, Microsoft Office, Mendeley and Evernote. I am not a fan of security combos, so I did not even install Adguard with Bitdefender to avoid any slowdowns. I also need to mention that I got shorter battery life with Bd installed, but it is worth mentioning that automatic profiles helped a bit.