How Much Disk I/O is Acceptable?

I know quite a few of you worry about how much disk I/O an antivirus uses. How much is "acceptable"? I've been trying to monitor Avast!s but a lot of the times it doesn't even show up in Resource Monitor as having any.

 

Avast free and wsa paid have the lowest disk io. When you have a lot of signed apps, a avast will have indeed near to zero io. When you have a lot of unsigned apps, you should see on average 40k to 80k bytes io, upping to 110. To 140 after updates.

 

Are there any test who measure this on different products? I have a new laptop and even if av-comp says eset (as an example) is as light as it gets I can still feel it. My browser is a bit slower. The same goes for some of the other top guns. (norton 2012, kis 2012, avast 7.0 )

It would be interesting seeing some reviews on this matter.

 

nvm, misunderstood..

 

I agree and I think it is also because of this:

http://i.imgur.com/gcptM.jpg

I have avast 7 pro currently in use, since I think it is very light on the system. Although mileage may vary when the program starts to actively scan/block, but in idle it is light in my opinion.

 

You're talking RAM? Not disk i/o?

 

A little unrelated, but I noticed after logging in and trying to go directly to Chrome, my system seemed laggy. I went to Resource Monitor and my disk I/O for System was 5,000,000 B/Sec! That explains now why systems seem slow right after logging in. Is it everything being loaded to RAM from the hard drive?

Also, has the newest Panda Cloud improved their disk I/O? And Roboscan?

 

It's likely loading up cached files to RAM.

 

personally, i've never seen any "alarming" disk utilization in the form of reads /or/ writes from a modern product on a modern version of windows. fwiw, the vast majority of complaints i've seen on wilders regarding product disk reads/writes is usually in the form of "omgz too many bytez in taskmgr columns!!!" - and with regard to pcav, i've never actually /seen/ numbers from anyone who complained about disk i/o issues with that product to form an opinion of it. just lots and lots of chatter about it.

as long as you're not seeing constant disk iops by the product via resource monitor, you're likely just fine.

as far as things being loaded into ram at boot, yes, that's part of what happens at boot. superfetch prefetches a number of things and puts them in RAM 1. make more efficient use of available system ram for caching and 2. to improve performance of commonly used applications. you'll also see system processes writing boot up telemetry and system status to event logs at boot.

 

Never really measured, honestly. I only ever noticed when it was crazy high due to some incompatibility issue.

 

Nope, still the highest out there.

 

I haven't found Panda to be a concern.

 

To answer the OP's question: if you can hear the HDD clattering away when the system should be idle, it's too much disk I/O.

 

What's the main problem regarding disk I/O? Will the system be slower?

 

Absolutely. The disk subsystem is the most bottle-necked part of most systems. Overloading that will slow things down, a lot. That's why I get frustrated when I see people complain about "Oh no, my AV software is using 'xxx' MB of RAM, it's too heavy!" when in reality an actual heavy product is probably sucking up all of the disk i/o.

 

As said I have only experience with Avast and WSA, with WSA being the one with lowest disk I/O (when you disable local blacklist data base with most recent malware for off line protection). Avast caching and the new cloud trickle make it the one with lowest disk IO of free products using more or less local blacklist updates. From the cloud products I have not been impressed by disk I/O efficiency of Panda (don't know the improvements of the recent 2.0 though).

When you put Chrome in your startup folder, it is possoble to 'save' some time while the Ram Cache is filled from disk and Chrome is connecting out to the internet (at least when you start a homepage). When you have a multi core CPU or a single core with multi threading technology, CPU will process these tasks partly in parallel.

 

Ya, but when people are limited on RAM and certain AV's are using upward to 100k or more, it can take it's toll on a older computer wouldn't you think?

 

If a machine is so limited that 100k is an issue, it probably doesn't meet the minimum requirements to run a virus. Seriously though, I have seen programs that use almost no RAM bring a machine to its knees while I have seen others that used a lot and didn't noticeably slow things down. Judging a program's heaviness solely based on the amount of RAM it is using is not an accurate measurement.

 

Yep, it goes both ways. But excessive ram usage can slow a computer down.

 

completely agree with this
its quite annoying how alot of people judge the 'lightness' of an AV by how much RAM it uses.

 

I/O usage is the most important factor when it comes to AV & AM security products, even more than RAM usage since all computer purchased from 2007 onwards came with at least 1GB RAM, because of Windows Vista.
An AV that uses a lot of I/O can bring a computer down to its knees.

If you doubt it, do the following, first, disable momentarily your AV, create a new folder on your desktop and name it "Downloads", then open your web-browser and go to FileHippo and download 50+ .exe files and save them to the "Downloads" folder you just created. Re-enable your AV and open the "Downloads" folder with all the .exe files. Wait to see how log it takes before you can actually interact with any of the files in that folder. That's I/O.

By the way, one of the worse AVs on that regard is MSE [which I'm using at the moment ]

Carlos

 

Those are reads, not writes. Something the AV has to do to you know, scan the file. Big whoop, it means nothing especially if you're on a fast HDD or an SSD, you will notice no performance loss.

 

Really?

The laptop where I ran this test has 4GB RAM, an Intel Core2Duo processor running at 2.20GHz and a 250GB HDD spinning at 7,200 RPM running Windows 7 Pro.
Is that a slow laptop computer?

And, however, I notice the drag whenever I open the "Downloads" folder with all the 50+ .exe files in it and the AV [MSE, in this particular case] starts scanning each one of the .exe files in it.

Whether "writes", "reads", "I/O" or whatever it's called not all the AVs out there behave similarly when it comes to processor time, HDD usage and RAM usage.


Carlos

 

Are there any I/O tests of AV products?

 

the performance tests done by av-comparatives take that sort of thing into account w/their automated test routines.

i mentioned this before, but if you want to evaluate disk utilization by an av product, and you're on a modern version of windows (e.g. not xp) you can use resource monitor. since computers' configurations vary so much, it's nearly impossible to quantify specific numbers that would be alarming in every situation.