Still using antivirus?
- Thread starter Bumpyride
- Start date
It's more the IO (potentially blocking!) that I'm concerned about. With dual/quad Core 2's nowadays I've got cycles to spare, but the IO usage of virus scanners hits the bottom line rather seriously (much more than 2%) in a number of applications, compiling being just one of them.
High-five for my compilin' buddy AndyTX rejecting antivirus for exactly the same reasons I do.
But real-time av scanner is still a good compliment when surfing the internet. Might pick up malware embedded in ads, or malicious code etc. Of course hosts file, ad blockers etc help but you never know and then when it happens that 'high-five' will be a 'fist through the monitor'. 
AcceleratorX
Newcomer
IMO an AV still has a use. The biggest use might be on unpatched computers, where exploits can be successfully blocked. IMO AVs with better features are much more useful and a web shield and proactive protection module (example: F-Secure DeepGuard, Kaspersky Proactive Defense) are really important and can actually provide noteworthy zero-day protection. As time passes I think more and more AVs will evolve in this direction.
In the anals of "how much does real time scanning cost", a few years ago at work my team had special permissions to disable virus scanning during asset builds. Doing a data build with the scanner on would add over 20 minutes to the build time, usually a 2hour process.
Now I agree with most of the points here if your not doing massively IO bound opperations it's not a big deal, but it can for somewhat extreme workloads be very significant. You can configure them to ignore certain file types and in the case above this was supposed to have been done, but we still saw the 20 minute hit.
Like everything else in security, it's convenience vs how secure you want to be. Loosing my machine at home is just an inconvenience, so I just run scans by hand regularly rather than running a continuous scan. And as I said earlier, I've been infected by exactly 1 virus ever, and that was a direct result of my actions.
Now I agree with most of the points here if your not doing massively IO bound opperations it's not a big deal, but it can for somewhat extreme workloads be very significant. You can configure them to ignore certain file types and in the case above this was supposed to have been done, but we still saw the 20 minute hit.
Like everything else in security, it's convenience vs how secure you want to be. Loosing my machine at home is just an inconvenience, so I just run scans by hand regularly rather than running a continuous scan. And as I said earlier, I've been infected by exactly 1 virus ever, and that was a direct result of my actions.
Yes, many years ago circa 2000/2001, the AntiVirus programs blew goats. The hard drives were also significantly slower too. It was a real bitch when running Sun's Compliance Testing Suite for J2EE App Server providers. It actually turned a 3-4 hour test suite cycle into an overnight 15+ hour run and sometimes it would crash the system without finishing. Symantec would cause Windows to run out of IO Handles. After we showed this, we were allowed to disable the AV on the test boxes.
nod32 running and havent noticed any slowdown in any of my surfing/computing habits.
Of course AV realtime scans slow a computer. This effect seems minimal on multicore systems with plenty of memory. Background scans are a totally different beast and drag down perf even on multicore for the reasons already stated - competition for IO. Now if you're not doing IO intensive stuff (say your using word, excel, surfing, etc.) you're not going to notice it so much. Compiling or rendering or recoding/transcoding, however, are IO intensive so it can make a huge difference.
Test it yourself - recode a dvd to avi or similar with and without background and realtime scanning. Big hits compared to surfing or office type tasks.
(preaching to the choir)
Test it yourself - recode a dvd to avi or similar with and without background and realtime scanning. Big hits compared to surfing or office type tasks.
(preaching to the choir)
Blazkowicz
Legend
a PC?
Probably a smoothwall PC. You can get AV plugins and schtuff. Now, whether that's worth dumping 10x the electricity into vs. a ddwrt'ed WRT54g.....
For the people who don't use AV software: how do you know you're clean? You don't.
How many of you sometimes fix the computers of others that don't run so well by simply removing a whole bunch of nasty crap?
Many people still use cable without a router, IE6 and an old, unpaid Symantec. And even if you do use a router and FF/Opera, you might simply think: "My PC has become quite sluggish. Well, it's Windows, so it happens. Perhaps it's time to reinstall." While it might be crawling with nasties and be part of a bot network simply because you once downloaded something that contained a Trojan.
How many of you sometimes fix the computers of others that don't run so well by simply removing a whole bunch of nasty crap?
Many people still use cable without a router, IE6 and an old, unpaid Symantec. And even if you do use a router and FF/Opera, you might simply think: "My PC has become quite sluggish. Well, it's Windows, so it happens. Perhaps it's time to reinstall." While it might be crawling with nasties and be part of a bot network simply because you once downloaded something that contained a Trojan.
Tell your pet Noodles to use the Norton removal tool, and then clean out the rest of it's carcauss manually. But yes of the 10 uninstalls I've done of Norton on my VM half of them never finished, leaving me no choice but to use removal tool or reload VM.
Neither do you know that if you're using AV software. In fact the whole AV/firewall software has huge potential for misrepresentation since its in the software vendor's best industry for it to tell you that it has blocked/fixed things occasionally to keep you using it. Just food for thought
What it comes down to is that if I don't notice any slowdown and my productivity is unaffected then for the most part I don't care either way. It sounds stuid, but a "virus" that has no discernably effect isn't really a problem. I do enough stuff that I'd notice immediately - in a very quantifiable way - if the computer gets slower.
That all said, I really doubt that I've had any viruses in the past few years. Of course I can't be 100% sure, but neither can anyone.
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