[Help] - Degrading Performance Issues Client & Server

First, I want to thank anybody stopping by to read this.

I have recently taken a job with a new company as a Sys Admin, and we are using various ESET products after leaving Symantec.

I am noticing though severe performance degradations at times with no "real" explanation but all seem to correlate with ESET RTP / AV client side.

Server side, I have caught ESET File Server running its own scans probably triggered by a ghost schedule somewhere.

Just a short list of the perceived issues.

• Severe OS hang ups periodically when clients utilize Folder Redirections. Anywhere from 3 or 4 seconds to longest of about 4 minutes 37 seconds (timed.)
• Random 100% single core utilizations (with no visual triggers, logs, or events.) Symptoms are akin to an infinite loop.
• Periodically slow response times when accessing information on our Intranet and sometimes clients lose connectivity to the Internet.
• Random scans that appear midday and are unscheduled. Not startup scans, not login scans either.
• Some interference with SAP Business One (v8.82), our add ons, and performance. I.e. The program is slow, but much worse with ESET RTP enabled.

Things tried:

• Set the folder redirection cache (C:\Windows\CSC\*) exclusion and to SAP Business One folder.
• Disabled RTP on the File Server (only semi-effective) trying to ascertain where the hang ups are occurring.
• Disabled Scheduled Scans in an attempt to stop random scans.
• Set clients to not scan Network drives.
• Restarting afflicted machines does relieve some of the symptoms, but almost never permanently.
• Some users have gotten in the habit of resetting the machine when they get in and after lunch.

All in all, ESET doesn't seem to be as smooth as a transition as my boss would have liked, what we need to know is, are we just improperly configured or is this common amongst other users?

If so, it maybe that ESET is not the best for our particular needs, nor is our hardware the newest either but upgrading all our machines is simply not a financially sound idea.

Are there any more experienced members willing to offer suggestions on increasing performance, without sacrificing too much security?

The majority of users NEED real time protection enabled. Unfortunately. We have two new machines (identical hardware specs to machines with issues) in the office. We are using the same software, navigating the same network folders/files, using folder redirection, but are having zero issues with the machines. The only thing left to be deployed to them is ESET. Due to the variety of our machines it was hard to finally realize that our systems were being ran down by the ESET Endpoint protection. The two new machines greatly pushed us to that conclusion as well. I was not here for the previous setup or Symantec, nor do I have any experience by ESET, so the information I have gathered was that it has been like this for 3 months, which is since ESET was introduced to our network.

As you can see I have researched our individual symptoms but I am getting to the point where I have other work I need to get done and so do our employees. Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Edit: Added Network drive exclusions and reasons leading us to believe ESET is the core of our particular issues.

 

Hello,
you've mentioned certain things you have tried. Do you mean that none of them worked except disabling real-time protection on the server?

 

Let me explain our setup and what we did exactly with that.

We have a file server with ESET File Security on it. This is where our folder redirections are going to.

My thoughts were initially:
Client has ESET RTP.
Server has ESET RTP.
Potentially when a file was accessed or modified I felt that perhaps one or the other were conflicting with access to the file directly.

Much like when you download a new file the from the web, it hangs at 98% for a second or two, then ESET lets it finish for example.

This was then inadvertently causing the client to lock up (or the Server potentially to freeze on a file) and freezing the OS.

Now disabling one was the hypothesis. So I started with the File Server. It appeared to help but the symptoms remained after sitting it for a day or two, for observations.

Only when ESET was completely disabled on both sides, did the OSes began acting normal again. I actually think there is a small bug on the network side of things in ESET.

I have seen no official word that the problems with ESET 5.x and Folder Redirections have been fixed. Is this true?