App Review Emsisoft Anti-Malware quick review

[mlnevese]

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.

Interesting. I wonder what is the cause is then as all my computers use desktop Adguard as well with no slowdown or extremely high memory usage...

As I said in other thread all security software has strange bugs. Kaspersky likes to stop some of the pages I need to work from fully loading and ESET didn't like one of my computers was trying to talk to a Brother high speed scanner

 

[Divine_Barakah]

Interesting. I wonder what the cause is then as all my computers use desktop Adguard as well with no slowdown or extremely high memory usage...

As I said in other thread all security software has strange bugs. Kaspersky likes to stop some of the pages I need to work from fully loading and ESET didn't like one of my computers was trying to talk to a Brother high speed scanner

On a desktop, the story is different. You do not have a battery to worry about nor a noisy fan. And I do agree that a product cannot work on every single configuration out there.

 

[Dex4Sure]

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.

The thing is... Its bad excuse from an AV vendor. Windows Defender works pretty much with whatever you run on the system. AV cannot be limiting what you can and what you can't run on the system.

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.

Although Kaspersky does use more CPU than ESET. At least this is what I've encountered on multiple systems. Also it does use more RAM during scans. If you've got slow computer, ESET likely slows down the boot up more since it performs start up scan at system boot while Kaspersky does not. However I think after that tables switch as ESET uses less CPU for scanning. So when you open programs, copy files etc ESET should have lesser impact on system performance. Both have HTTPS scanning enabled by default, but ESET's implementation uses less CPU as well. I'd turn that off for both though. But yes, Kaspersky is among the lightest overall as well. Considering Kaspersky also has behavior blocker that makes it all the more impressive.

 

[Local Host]

The thing is... Its bad excuse from an AV vendor. Windows Defender works pretty much with whatever you run on the system. AV cannot be limiting what you can and what you can't run on the system.

Although Kaspersky does use more CPU than ESET. At least this is what I've encountered on multiple systems. Also it does use more RAM during scans. If you've got slow computer, ESET likely slows down the boot up more since it performs start up scan at system boot while Kaspersky does not. However I think after that tables switch as ESET uses less CPU for scanning. So when you open programs, copy files etc ESET should have lesser impact on system performance. Both have HTTPS scanning enabled by default, but ESET's implementation uses less CPU as well. I'd turn that off for both though. But yes, Kaspersky is among the lightest overall as well. Considering Kaspersky also has behavior blocker that makes it all the more impressive.

Kaspersky always at 0% CPU usage for me, unless I run a full scan (which is only needed to do on first time setup).

Which everyone seemed to have missed here, first time setups of AVs are always demanding as they are creating the cache and all that, after a few hours or a day tops, performance impact will lower severely (Bit Defender is still among the most heavy and buggy AVs in the market).

 

[Dex4Sure]

Kaspersky always at 0% CPU usage for me, unless I run a full scan (which is only needed to do on first time setup).

Which everyone seemed to have missed here, first time setups of AVs are always demanding as they are creating the cache and all that, after a few hours or a day tops, performance impact will lower severely (Bit Defender is still among the most heavy and buggy AVs in the market).

Yes, that is true. I ran Kaspersky Cloud Free for few months about year back and when I had disabled HTTPS scanning on it, it was really light indeed. Not quite ESET light, but that's really nitpicking at that point. I got just fed up with Kaspersky for other reasons, mainly due to them trying to shovel in more what I'd call bloatware on their products. On ESET internet security bloatware is very minimal (at least for now).

 

[plat]

Well, concerning the "memory use optimization" setting Emsisoft has, this is cosmetic only? Or I'm missing some crucial understanding about this feature?

I would want to know the resource consumption of various software and not stash it away so that I feel better about looking in Task Manager or whatever. Good thing Emsi does this by opting in.

I recall another antivirus that was doing this as a default--I believe it was Webroot. Not sure if it's doing actual memory use hiding this way still but I found this a rather questionable practice at the time. Sneaky, kind of.

 

[Local Host]

I've seen another BD-based antivirus having this and I believe memory management is a feature of BD Kit, which is just not provided in the official product.
If I remember right it was Total Defence that have this feature.

Honestly if you look at F-Secure, it was a day and night difference when they dropped BD for Avira, is way lighter now.

 

[fabiobr]

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.

I experienced high disk usage, medium CPU usage (a little bit less than Kaspersky) and lighter at browsing than Kaspersky. It uses less battery of my laptop than Kaspersky too.

One thing I do notice: Bitdefender chooses the engine accordingly to your PC setup, if they see high-end hardware they seem not to care about being light as it should.

 

[SumTingWong]

I remember Emsisoft said it is okay for 450MB RAM usage for AV. Emsisoft also said signatures load from RAM is faster and less impact than storage drive.

 

[Dex4Sure]

I remember Emsisoft said it is okay for 450MB RAM usage for AV. Emsisoft also said signatures load from RAM is faster and less impact than storage drive.

Well... Emsisoft uses more both RAM and virtual RAM for me.

Private bytes left, working set right (displayed by process explorer). I mean ESET uses a lot less of both virtual and physical RAM. Can't really get away from it. If you look at combined usage of RAM and virtual RAM of all those Emsisoft processes, we're looking at like over 1.3GB usage if my quick math doesn't fail me... While ESET is using just about 250MB of RAM and virtual RAM combined in contrast.

I gave Emsisoft last try this time also just letting it sit idle for few hours when I was afk (this screenshot BTW was taken on the last Emsisoft try and ESET screenshot just now as I'm using it). RAM usage had dropped at lowest to around 170MB according to task manager. The moment I launched a game it shot back up over 350MB instantly. Probably if I had started couple other programs on the side it would have been over 500MB again, but I just grew tired and uninstalled it one last time.

And its not just high memory usage, it is also higher CPU usage. Monitoring this time TW: Warhammer 2 by starting it up 3 times netted about 15-17% CPU usage spike for Emsisoft each time. Windows Defender topped at around 8%. ESET peaked at about 7% as well this time on the first launch. However on 2nd and 3rd launches both WD and ESET barely used any CPU, while Emsisoft kept using the same amount each time...

I do wonder how much it was actually using virtual RAM on top of physical RAM when it was using 1.7GB. Didn't realize to check with process explorer that time

 

[Evjl's Rain]

I do wonder how much it was actually using virtual RAM on top of physical RAM when it was using 1.7GB. Didn't realize to check with process explorer that time

• Open up Performance Monitor (perfmon.exe)
• Add Counters -> Paging File -> % Usage

 

[Faybert]

Well... Emsisoft uses more both RAM and virtual RAM for me.
View attachment 254329View attachment 254331
Private bytes left, working set right (displayed by process explorer). I mean ESET uses a lot less of both virtual and physical RAM. Can't really get away from it. If you look at combined usage of RAM and virtual RAM of all those Emsisoft processes, we're looking at like over 1.3GB usage if my quick math doesn't fail me... While ESET is using just about 250MB of RAM and virtual RAM combined in contrast.

I gave Emsisoft last try this time also just letting it sit idle for few hours when I was afk (this screenshot BTW was taken on the last Emsisoft try and ESET screenshot just now as I'm using it). RAM usage had dropped at lowest to around 170MB according to task manager. The moment I launched a game it shot back up over 350MB instantly. Probably if I had started couple other programs on the side it would have been over 500MB again, but I just grew tired and uninstalled it one last time.

And its not just high memory usage, it is also higher CPU usage. Monitoring this time TW: Warhammer 2 by starting it up 3 times netted about 15-17% CPU usage spike for Emsisoft each time. Windows Defender topped at around 8%. ESET peaked at about 7% as well this time on the first launch. However on 2nd and 3rd launches both WD and ESET barely used any CPU, while Emsisoft kept using the same amount each time...

I do wonder how much it was actually using virtual RAM on top of physical RAM when it was using 1.7GB. Didn't realize to check with process explorer that time

Want to solve your problem? Post here: Emsisoft Anti-Malware Home It's simple.

 

[Dex4Sure]

Want to solve your problem? Post here: Emsisoft Anti-Malware Home It's simple.

So Emsisoft will fix what seems to be caused by Bitdefender engine? Good one. It'd be just a lot of wasted time. If I could tolerate Bitdefender's bloatware more than 1 hour on my systems maybe I could manage to reproduce similar performance issues with its software. I mean I already saw 400-500MB RAM usage with Bitdefender IS so it seems to correlate strongly with the numbers Emsisoft was giving out.

Like someone else already mentioned, F-Secure magically became lot lighter INSTANTLY after they switched from Bitdefender to Avira engine. Coincidence? Doubt it.

 

[Faybert]

So Emsisoft will fix what seems to be caused by Bitdefender engine? Good one. It'd be just a lot of wasted time. If I could tolerate Bitdefender's bloatware more than 1 hour on my systems maybe I could manage to reproduce similar performance issues with its software. I mean I already saw 400-500MB RAM usage with Bitdefender IS so it seems to correlate strongly with the numbers Emsisoft was giving out.

Like someone else already mentioned, F-Secure magically became lot lighter INSTANTLY after they switched from Bitdefender to Avira engine. Coincidence? Doubt it.

You are generalizing a situation that is happening only to you, most have no problem with the use of RAM and CPU, this behavior on your pc is very strange, I tested it here and it is super light, it seems to me that the problem is related to your computer , no AV makes high use of CPU and RAM when you are in full screen (game or movies)

 

[Nightwater]

Here too Emsisoft is light, no problem with it, problems like yours have to be posted on their forum as was said, they are super quick to respond

 

[Dex4Sure]

You are generalizing a situation that is happening only to you, most have no problem with the use of RAM and CPU, this behavior on your pc is very strange, I tested it here and it is super light, it seems to me that the problem is related to your computer , no AV makes high use of CPU and RAM when you are in full screen (game or movies)

It isn't happening only to me. Just look up online. Most people just won't bother to bring it up, they'll just uninstall and install another solution. I've tried Emsisoft before on another system with old i7 4 core + 16GB RAM and it caused similar issues. There was a guy on that article's comment section the Emsisoft guy linked talking about very much the same issues that I'm pointing out now. That was 5 years ago. He had top of the line system as well at the time.

Why antivirus uses so much RAM - And why that is actually a good thing! | Emsisoft | Security Blog Just scroll down to first long comment. 100% agree with the guy and he wrote it 5 years ago.

And it's not just it really slows it down, its rather hard for AV to slow down 10 core 20 thread CPU... But it is taking up way too many resources on the side.

 

[Digmor Crusher]

For most the high ram usage does not happen, same as any software, a small percentage of users will have issues. You guys are flogging a dead horse here.

 

[forgottenuser79643]

Just going to say it, but if it doesn't work on your system, but it does everyone else's than its most likely your system. Not trying to be rude or anything, but you are describing an issue that really only effected a select few. And any AV, and I do mean any and every other AV, has their small group of users with issues. It just so happens you are one of them.

"If it don't work, it don't work."

You are also not willing to look into it, by flagging it on the Emsisoft forum. Which is fine, your choice and I respect that. But don't keep on repeating the same thing with the same comments over and over again. It will only look like you're trying to beat a dead horse, just for the sheer fun of it and other users might be less... inclined to give more meaningful comments. If Eset works for your situation, and you are satisfied with it, go with Eset. If it's Kaspersky, then go for that and so on.

 

[Nightwater]

Just going to say it, but if it doesn't work on your system, but it does everyone else's than its most likely your system. Not trying to be rude or anything, but you are describing an issue that really only effected a select few. And any AV, and I do mean any and every other AV, has their small group of users with issues. It just so happens you are one of them.

"If it don't work, it don't work."

You are also not willing to look into it, by flagging it on the Emsisoft forum. Which is fine, your choice and I respect that. But don't keep on repeating the same thing with the same comments over and over again. It will only look like you're trying to beat a dead horse, just for the sheer fun of it and other users might be less... inclined to give more meaningful comments. If Eset works for your situation, and you are satisfied with it, go with Eset. If it's Kaspersky, then go for that and so on.

I agree 100% with you, so it has been commented before if you want to solve your problem even post on the Emsisoft forum, here nobody will solve it

 

[SumTingWong]

Well... Emsisoft uses more both RAM and virtual RAM for me.
View attachment 254329View attachment 254331
Private bytes left, working set right (displayed by process explorer). I mean ESET uses a lot less of both virtual and physical RAM. Can't really get away from it. If you look at combined usage of RAM and virtual RAM of all those Emsisoft processes, we're looking at like over 1.3GB usage if my quick math doesn't fail me... While ESET is using just about 250MB of RAM and virtual RAM combined in contrast.

I gave Emsisoft last try this time also just letting it sit idle for few hours when I was afk (this screenshot BTW was taken on the last Emsisoft try and ESET screenshot just now as I'm using it). RAM usage had dropped at lowest to around 170MB according to task manager. The moment I launched a game it shot back up over 350MB instantly. Probably if I had started couple other programs on the side it would have been over 500MB again, but I just grew tired and uninstalled it one last time.

And its not just high memory usage, it is also higher CPU usage. Monitoring this time TW: Warhammer 2 by starting it up 3 times netted about 15-17% CPU usage spike for Emsisoft each time. Windows Defender topped at around 8%. ESET peaked at about 7% as well this time on the first launch. However on 2nd and 3rd launches both WD and ESET barely used any CPU, while Emsisoft kept using the same amount each time...

I do wonder how much it was actually using virtual RAM on top of physical RAM when it was using 1.7GB. Didn't realize to check with process explorer that time

Yike. High ram usage and cpu usage. I am happy with ESET Nod32.