SpywareBlaster & Performance Impacts Regarding its Design

Yeah I know this has been beaten to death, and yes I have done various searches on this prior to making the topic. Problem is, despite all that I always get a kind of mixed answer that SpywareBlaster technically does impact and technically doesn't. I have used it far back in the past but for some reason this always bothered me and I've been on the fence for a long time since I formatted to Vista then to 7. Recently though I've really wanted to get back into it but I'm a bit wary.

I guess the question is already there: Does SpywareBlaster actually impact performance? I mean this with respect to using Vista and Windows 7 as I remember from the previous IE8 debacle when it was first released (which is now resolved) that IE does play some sort of under the hood role in performance on some things. Am I making a crazy connection here or is there some merit to that?

Reason being is that from what I understand your browser/system will ultimately have to do some sort of loading of all these entries at one point or another. I'm not exactly sure of the specifics but I do know a large Hosts file and exceptions list may impact things, and if it all is connected together under the hood it could lead to room for slow downs. It doesn't necessarily mean right now, but since the format so far is to keep adding more definitions, it will eventually get to the point of being incredibly massive. (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, only going by what I've read)

So that being said, can anyone give me a definitive answer addressing this? Do you think I won't have any issues with performance (especially being on Windows 7)? Is there a plan in the future for when the definition size gets way too big? Is there actually a fundamental solution to this in the program that is being/has been addressed? If for whatever reason I do experience slow-downs, does simply disabling protection & uninstalling fix it? Or am I just going nuts? : )

Some supplementary info on this is that I don't really use IE at all, mainly other programs I have use it extensively such as Windows Live Messenger for loading certain ads, etc. Just don't want to see any strange slowdowns if these are connected in any way. Also predominantly I use Firefox (3.6.10) and I'm not sure if this will impact its speed in terms of how it loads these entries.

I'd really like to give the program another go, but being the performance freak I am this gnawed away at me too much to make a final decision.

 

Hi,

A few quick things up-front:

• It's free.
• There should be zero noticable slowdown from enabling SpywareBlaster's protection.
• Disabling All Protection removes the changes SpywareBlaster makes.

Thus, I'd encourage you to download, install it, enable all protection, and see for yourself. If, for whatever reason, you want to remove it - just Disable All Protection and uninstall it. That's it.

----

Now, to expand on the above a bit:

SpywareBlaster uses various mechanisms built-into web browsers to lock down certain actions / potential vectors for potentially unwanted software / cookies / etc. These mechanisms require, in essence, lists.

At some point, these lists must indeed be loaded so they can be quickly searched for matches. (This is often done *once*. In some cases, this means at browser startup. In other cases it means when a registry hive is loaded. This is incredibly fast, and often even moreso on Windows 7.)

For each page you browse to, these list(s) may be searched for matches. This is often done by what is effectively direct lookup. (The browser can ask "is example.com on the list", and can obtain the answer without having to look at every item on the list. Thus, the number of items on the list has little impact on the time it takes to see if the list contains a particular item - it is effectively instantaneous. The technical specifics of this were explained in another thread, which it sounds like you may have read.)

To summarize: There should be no noticeable slow-down.

Yes, with SpywareBlaster installed it means some additional things have to happen. But because of how everything works together, and some technical magic, you should not notice *any negative impact*. To use a popular English proverb, it is essentially possible to have your cake and eat it too. And if you don't want to either eat or have cake... you can just Disable All Protection and uninstall the program.

I hope this helps provides a bit more clarity.

Best regards,

-Javacool

 

Thanks for the prompt reply!

After reading it through it helped scare away my fears (if that even makes sense) and I decided to try/test it out a bit with the various things I do on my computer. I'm very glad to say that I can't see any difference in performance at all and everything has been running as smoothly as before. So much for being on the fence for that long!