Emsisoft Blog: Why antivirus uses so much RAM – And why that is actually a good thing!

[Gandalf_The_Grey]

Posting an old blog post of 2016 because a lot of people look at memory usage of an AV and this post explains that memory is the fastest part of your computer and there to be used.

Lots of computer blogs and magazines give smart advice on how to speed up your computer by reducing the load on your hardware resources. While it is true that having a few gigabytes of free hard disk space is better than no space, the same wisdom usually isn’t true for your RAM (Random Access Memory), your computer’s super-fast short term memory.

Why antivirus uses so much RAM - And why that is actually a good thing!

Learn why freeing RAM doesn't necessarily speed up your computer. In reality it's often quite the opposite.

www.emsisoft.com

 

[Bot]

Thanks for sharing this informative post! It's indeed crucial to understand that antivirus software needs to use a significant amount of RAM to function efficiently and protect your system effectively. This doesn't necessarily slow down your computer, but rather allows the antivirus to perform its tasks in the fastest possible way.

 

[lokamoka820]

So if understand well, if the antivirus software doesn't uses do much RAM it will use SSD instead?

 

[Vitali Ortzi]

So if understand well, if the antivirus software doesn't uses do much RAM it will use SSD instead?

It will have to get the signatures from somewhere either RAM, cloud(to ram ) ,rom
So depends but probably from cloud if it can if not then possible it will waste resources extracting from your rom (SSD in this case )
Av uses ram to cache not just that but all kind of other components they have and if they had to load , extract it from slower memory it will take more cycles

 

[Vitali Ortzi]

Thanks for sharing this informative post! It's indeed crucial to understand that antivirus software needs to use a significant amount of RAM to function efficiently and protect your system effectively. This doesn't necessarily slow down your computer, but rather allows the antivirus to perform its tasks in the fastest possible way.

Comodo doesn't use much ram nor other software like cyberlock (voodoo shield)
So they don't necessarily need to take a lot of ram

 

[lokamoka820]

It will have to get the signatures from somewhere either RAM, cloud(to ram ) ,rom
So depends but probably from cloud if it can if not then possible it will waste resources extracting from your rom (SSD in this case )
Av uses ram to cache not just that but all kind of other components they have and if they had to load , extract it from slower memory it will take more cycles

So for example, Bitdefender has big signatures, does it save it in RAM rather than wasting my SSD space? What about Kaspersky with its low RAM usage, does it save signatures to SSD?

 

[Vitali Ortzi]

So for example, Bitdefender has big signatures, does it save it in RAM rather than wasting my SSD space? What about Kaspersky with its low RAM usage, does it save signatures to SSD?

You will have to check how much io is read from the database files to check that
But usually antivirus software only store part of the signatures in fast access memory and else try to get it from cloud or ram

 

[Jonny Quest]

Comodo doesn't use much ram nor other software like cyberlock (voodoo shield)
So they don't necessarily need to take a lot of ram

As well as ESET, as we all know. I'm really not sure I'm totally believing the article, as maybe at that time it was a technical white paper from a company who had high ram use, and was coming up with a "excuse", reason for it or that's just how it was back then? And I have no technical basis to prove or disprove it, as it's just been an observation from using F-Secure, Kaspersky, Bitdefender and ESET with all of their differing use of RAM. Bitdefender being the highest I've experienced. And maybe (they have) things have improved lately with more being done through the cloud, compared to 2016.

 

[Vitali Ortzi]

As well as ESET, as we all know. I'm really not sure I'm totally believing the article, as maybe it was a technical white paper from a company who had high ram use, and was coming up with a "excuse", reason for it? And I have no technical basis to prove or disprove it, as it's just been an observation from using F-Secure, Kaspersky, Bitdefender and ESET with all of their differing use of RAM. Bitdefender being the highest I've experienced.

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Installing eset on my 2gb ram windows 11 will make it crawl while comodo barley slows it down and if you check kill switch , process explorer you can see eset using too much ram even when the machine is starving
So well it depends how much ram a machine has
A machine with 8gb of ram would have no ram issues with av software as he has enough extra but a 2gb ram machine can be starving without an av doing basic stuff and much more with av signatures forced in ram


Only low ram machines should care about the av software ram usage and on high ram machines av software will use a lot of ram if it improves performance to cache different components and full signatures