Which antivirus has the lowest CPU and memory usage?

Yes i cant wait to Kav release there 2006 final?.. But So far i love it..I'ts found a few nasties pc cillian decided to leave out?? I use the antihacker..along side..And am impressed on my little olle.. 380mb ram..80gig xp-pro machine!! I did go with Nod32 for a while but yes it crippled my machine 2..that Htpp scanner and Email scanner drove me nuts? KAV just sits there duz it's job...MD

 

NOD32 is the perfect solution...I've learned that KIS 2006 will be also very light in resources.

 

Anti-hacker isn't a good firewall as my experience. KIS2006 will be good alternative, but without anti-hacker or it must be develop much more.

 

I would say that this experience is not typical, Mele.

A full scan here takes about 16 minutes. NOD32 is still a very light AV.

 

On my machine, Nod32 takes only about 6 mb of RAM! How can u call that "bloated"??
And i've also tried KAV, it used to take around 26 mb!!!

Regards,
Kalpik

 

Sorry to hear NOD32 "crippled" your XP pro box. I run it here on an XP pro box, and it runs blindingly fast. Don't notice it at all. Also installed it last month on 8 brand new HP XP pro boxes--with IMON--and and it's virtually unnoticed on them. Have it also installed on 12 assorted W2K and XP pro boxes in another location with IMON chugging away, and it works great.

I could go on, but won't.

IMO, IMON is the best thing to happen to NOD32 since it's creation.

Rubbish.

 

How come your NOD is 6Mb. on my machine its over 15Mb.

 

No problem here with NOD32 and IMON on a WinXP game machine. Just as light and fast as ever. Also, no noticable difference with the IMON HTTP scanner enabled or disabled. Each platform is a bit different.

 

I have to agree that NOD32 is FAR from bloated. Mele20’s experience is certainly not typical and does not reflect how NOD32 runs for most people. On my machine it typically takes up 14-15 Mb’s of ram, sometime a bit more, sometime a bit less. A scan with all the options ticked takes around 14 minutes; I have 30 gigs of data on my HD. I have noticed no slowdown at all with NOD32 running and my machine actually runs noticeably faster with NOD than it did with AVG 7 free. Sorry to hear that you had a bad experience with NOD32 Mele, but that does not justify calling it bloated.

 

The amount of active memory an AV takes is not the only consideration. KAV 5 swaps out and needs about 10mb, but sometimes it can go as low as 5mb. However, total commit charge will remain unchanged as the program swaps out. There is also memory used by driver level components. You pretty much have to look at your system on a with and without basis to determine memory usage.

Unless the system is seriously constrained on memory (256mb or less) it does not make a lot of difference if an AV uses up 5 or 25 mb or active memory. However, I do caution that multiple security applications can add up to a bunch of resources and at that point you have not even begun to run an application. If your machine is msmory constrained and you plan on keeping it, just add some memory.

What is important is that the real time scanner does not slow things down overall. This is very much a YMMV area. The best process is to trial a few AV's and see what happens. The ones that seem to have the worst effect on system responsiveness are Norton plus any of the products with multiple engines.

 

For God sake do people have the slightest idea how to measure memory usage and Cpu resources ? No wonder why 90% of people on the internet is saying some product is light when they are heavy, and vice versa. ( I can not remember how many times people say KAV is lightest AV ) May be they are referring to KAV 2006

Tell you what. F-Prot could use as low as 19K if you force it. But so what? What is the point of having 1Gb of memory than? A program will try to use its optimal memory usuage by looking at the currently avalible memory. um.... Example - You have so many free memory than NOD have have more things in the memory. i.e 16 - 20 Mb. But if you have less memory than nod CAN scale down to ~6Mb.

CPU resources is measured by a long period of activity and reading its general Resources and CPU time.

You will also need to look at VM size as well. Coz this is really how much memory a program use. Although most people generally ignore that.

Then you have to add all process up. Most AV / AT / AP /whatever; have more than 1 process. Symantec is only very light when most people are looking at the single process. But when you add up all other 8 together than you will see it is not so light.

You should also take into account that Task manager is total piece of Junk at measuring. Get Process Explorer from Sysinternal. ( P.S Versoin 9.1 is just out )

After that. You will see NOD32 2.5 has slight increase in CPU as well as Memory usage. But it still provide the best protection per computer resources. And i still consider it among the lightest.

I haven't used Dr.Web before as i have already mentioned. So for me the lightest is still FProt with updater and Scheduler turn off. Uses only 2 Mb and no CPU resources. Because it is too light i consider it not good ( Coz i always wonder " Is it actually working?" Even though it always show up in eicar test )

I did also like to add; smothless of system. I think you need to test a AV ( or any software ) on a system for a period of time. Because what is working perfectly well for me may not be for others. Because of software incompablities, etc. Example. FProt still have the occasional CPU sprike that only happen after 3.16 update. I don't know why. But from than my system is no longer as smooth as before. While NOD is very smooth for me.

I hope this help people to start measuring resources the right way.

 

Nod32 (2.50.19) is good and lighest AV. But my some e-mail virus tests were unsuccesful. for example; from http://www.webmail.us/testvirus; Nod32 doesn't detect viruses or suspicious codes in #4, #5, #19, #22 e-mails with last updates. I repeated this test with kav 5.0.20 and KIS 2006 and these e-mails blocked, disinfected or deleted by KAV or KIS. This is important for me.
YES, AV must be lighest but security must be higher

 

For me F-Prot and avast! are the lightest AV's...

 

Very good post Iwod!!!

 

Hi, if you turn off the updater and scheduler, how can you update F-prot? And you cannot enable a automatic schedule either?

Also, I use Mcafee pro9 on a 1.1ghz, celeron with 256mb, not the fastest computer around but decent enough, I was wondering if I can turn off the email scanner and lighten it up a bit.

I have F-prot 4 as a backup but I autosurf and so webpages use droppers in my pc.

 

F prot 4 is not out yet, ( Unless you have a private Beta )

You can set up update via the Window Scheduler. I think i have a script lying somewhere. But you can search in here. As it has already been mention number of times.

Edit: I think there is a sudden increase of vistors. Simply look at how many thread on resources usage. i just wish they could all search before asking.

 

i agree...

 

I like NOD32, but it definitely does NOT have the smallest memory imprint.

On my machine:

NOD32krn.exe = 16 612K (peak working set: 21 900K)
nod32kui.exe = 2 212K (peak working set: 5 672K)
NOD32.exe = 14 040K (Peak Working set: 14 168K)

After running my machine, scanning occasionally and updating NOD32 once (8 hours uptime on the machine).

That's far from "smallest".

 

HUh? where did NOD32.exe came from?

Read my post for explanation.......... what do you expect to be smallest?

 

So, there is no PUBLIC beta yet of F-Prot 4? Do you know when it will go to public beta? I really want to try it. I was impressed with 3.15 but the GUI for XP was too lacking. I didn't try 3.16 but recall reading that it was bloated. Maybe that has been corrected, I don't know. I am impatient for ver. 4 to come to public beta or be released. I'm also waiting on KAV 6. Gets tiresome. I think I cannot renew Bit Defender free after the year is up and I think that is September so these AVs need get something out there! Maybe I will do the NAV 2006 public beta. The DRM though stops me from using NAV again (as well as the poor support) although otherwise it's a fine AV.

As for F-Prot, I never knew 3.15 was there. I had to keep checking to make sure it was there because it was feather light on my XP box and when i would do a right click scan of a file I had just downloaded, it would scan so extremely fast that I wondered if it really scanned even though I would see the report on my screen. It was by far the fastest on demand scanner I have ever used and tests put it at the top for speed in scanning. Bit Defender is fast also but not as fast as F-Prot.

 

Last time i heard something was that they are finalizing which features to go into version 4. I am thinking they are still far away from finishing it.

 

That's the executable of the manual scanner just for comparison. To those who don't know, it does not run in the background by itself.

I did read it

I could have included the whole of commit charges and VM usage as well, but it would have been less pretty.

Smallest?

I don't expect anything to be smallest, certainly not NOD32

I agree that it depends on the machine (memory in use, settings, etc).

What I know is that DrWeb for instance takes always less memory on my machine, regardless of how I configure the two.

YMMV.

friendly regards,
Halcyon

PS Why did I write this? Because I dislike the fact that people always try to trump whatever it is that they have bought, wildly disregarding many facts.

Yes, NOD32 is very nice (I use it too), but it's certainly not the lightest anti-virus or best in everything. Nothing is "the best" in everything. People who are advocates for software "x" should understand that NO "x" ever is going to be best in everything.

Be open, look at the facts and judge for yourself. Don't believe the blind fundamentalists who will only try to feel secure by trumping their own purchase as the only / best choice

I think there's been way too much blind marketing of one's own choices here at Wilders during the past months. We don't want this to develop into another one of those "single truth" forums, where everybody who doesn't use software "x" is frowned upon, because it's not the "official" choice?

And to people who always reply to all "what software will I use" questions with your own choice of software: feeling more secure about your purchace isn't going to make your machine any more secure. And it certainly isn't going to make another person's machine any more secure either, especially if you give a misleading recommendation based on prejudice/personal choice alone (and not relying on facts)!

 

Halcyon: At last a person who has taken off the blinders an tells it like it is. I thank you, now would you tell us what you use an why you use it? This type of information is in my opinion the most useful.

Thanks
Wildman