How is NOD32 v3 Scanning "Faster" than v2 Scanning?

I'm looking to switch from Symantec because their AV products are so resource heavy, so I took a look at the NOD32 version 2.70.39 and 3.0.650 trials.

With disk space, I saw about 12 Meg more with v3 (~45 Meg vs. ~57 Meg after definition updates). No big deal - and much less than the 120 Meg of Symantec AntiVirus 10.1.7.

With process resources, they were about the same - but v3 keeps more in memory. With v2 there was ~26 Meg in RAM and ~23 Meg in VM. With v3, it jumped to ~35 Meg RAM but dropped to ~15 Meg VM. I'm not sure which way is better, but the totals are about the same and each only uses 2 processes. For comparison, Symantec's 7 processes take up 75 Meg RAM and 61 Meg VM (in case you're wondering why I need to switch... and those numbers aren't typos).

Then I did full scans. This was on a dummy system running XP SP2 (not SP3 yet) with a 2.8 GHz processor and 384 Meg RAM. Not much else installed beyond XP itself. There's about 3.4 Gig of data and no other programs running except the NOD32 scans. I also did full NOD32 updates and rebooted clean before each scan test.

Version 2 did a full scan in 12 minutes and 46 seconds. Version 3 took 14 minutes and 19 seconds. For comparison, Symantec AntiVirus took 21 minutes and 35 seconds.

Now this is hardly drastic and I'm not complaining or criticizing, but how is v3 scanning faster than v2 scanning (as the ESET web site claims) based on this testing? Am I missing something?

I suppose I prefer the v3 interface, but I'll stick with v2 if it's really 10% faster on scans. Every second counts.

 

Yes you are missing something. Subsequent scans with V3 will be quicker than the initial scan you performed. My scans with V2 ran 1 hour and 53 min. Scans with version 3 are 1 hour and 8 min.

 

Sorry, though I didn't mention it before, I did perform multiple scans (3 full scans with each version - scan/reboot/scan/scan) and v3 was always slower than v2.

I even tried scanning specific non-OS files (put into a single test folder) just in case there was something OS related v3 was hanging up on. And even on those non-OS files, v2 file scanning was faster every time.

Besides, if v3 is only faster on subsequent scans it is not technically "scanning" faster. That would be terminology cheating (it's really "rescanning" faster).

Still, NOD32 v3 has been the fastest scanning product for me so far. Only v2 seems to be faster.

Thanks!

 

Initial scan time with version 3 was identical to version 2 scans for me. Although subsequent scans were faster with 3 as I said due to smart scan technology which I believe employs additional checks on newly created files as opposed to existing files. If someone has a better understanding of it please give it a go.