Slowdown of Microsoft Visual Studio due to different Virus scanner

Question

What is the least slow Virus scanner to use with Microsoft Visual Studio

I have just had Microsoft Visual Studio “go slow” on me again due to my Virus Checker…

We all know that development tools do a lot of file access so are badly effect by Virus Scanner. Most of us have to run a Virus scanner due to do many reasons.

So has anyone measured the effect of different virus scanners (and settings) on the speed of Microsoft Visual Studio?

Has anyone tied Microsoft Security Essentials that has been recently released with Visual Studio?

See also (if you have the rep, please extend the list)

• What Really Slows Windows Down (This has some real data)
• Visual Studio and Virus Scan of Temp folder
• Visual Studio Optimizations
• Development machines and anti-virus policy (Sophos Anti-Virus)
• Antivirus (Symantec Endpoint) configuration for developer machine
• Least intrusive antivirus software for development PC?
• Suggestions for a productive hardware setup with excellent virus protection.
• Choosing Anti-Anti-Virus Software (Coding Horror)

What are peoples experiences with Visual Studio 2010 and virus checkers?

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I got this as part of a helpful email from someone (that will rename nameless) at Microsoft speaking on his own behalf.

It’s not clear that we (Microsoft) would be able to endorse 3rd party products. With that in mind, I did notice that in the posting Ian linked to (this question) that Computer Associates was listed by someone as one of the best performing virus checkers for development environments, which interestingly enough is a product that I believe many Microsoft developers use on their desktops.

Answer 1

Well to be honest, my work machine doesn't have a virus scanner installed, and for almost 2 years, I've never had a problem with viruses because I'm constantly behind corporate web patrol and other things keeps me pretty safe.

At home, though, I use NOD32, and on 3 different machines all using Visual Studio, I've never noticed any slowdowns. I apologize for not having any benchmarks to measure, just wanted to throw out my "answer."

Answer 2

I don't really have done any measurements, but what I usually do is to exclude the real time scanning of my development folder (usually my :\Projects folder). That way, the compiler can work as fast as possible during my everyday repetitive tasks. I do have a daily scan that have the folder in question in its path, in order to fetch any possible threat. On a subjective note, I prefer to use NOD32.

Answer 3

Don't use Kaspersky(The old Tect Review one) it slows down normal explorer file opening for almost 10 second(Yes, you need to wait 10 second before opening each folder). And yes it affects Visual Studio. The new version does not seem the have the problem. NOD32 seem to not have this problem, and is a bit faster than Kaspersky(I don't even know if it's scan as much as Kaspersky does).

But for what ever reason, NOD32 firewall is bad!

Answer 4

Based on previous installations at various jobs, empirically rated from slowest (very annoying) to quickest (almost no impact):

• Symantec (awful)
• McAfee
• AVG
• ESET
• Computer Associates (excellent)

I wouldn't bother with the speed tests, etc. shown at the AV review sites since most of these are in controlled environments, often with review-mode enabled. The impact will also vary depending on your network environment (workgroup or domain) and administrator-enforced policies.

Disclosure: I used to work on another now-obsolete anti-virus package back in the 90's.

Answer 5

We have Trend Micro antivirus at work, and it's terrible. It seems particularly bad doing checkouts.

We commissioned a new build machine recently, and the IS team hadn't set up exclusions for the build drives, and it was taking 45 minutes to check out source code from TFS. With the AV turned off, the exact same source code took about 1 minute 30 seconds to check out.

Answer 6

Exclude your project folders and the visual studio app folder for realtime scan, and schedule a scan as often as you can feel safe.

Answer 7

+1 for bringing this to light. Its one of those gripes that I have about corporate antivirus policy that kills developers on slow machines.

I know your question is virus scanner related, but I'm going to try this from another angle and try eliminate the dependency/effect of the virus scanner slowdown.

I'm a contractor and I've worked on a lot of different machines and I've learned a few tricks to speed up my environment on slower PC's.

Number 1: - if you're using Windows Vista / Windows 7 immediately look into using Readyboost. After I plugged a USB flash drive (readyboost capable), my build / project run times dropped dramatically. Readyboost buffers the fragmented parts of your cache and stops your hard drive head hopping all over. If you're not reading your hard drive, you're not virus scanning... Made a major difference for me. Unfortunately many office PC's are still XP - in that case this isn't an option.

Number 2: - if you're using a Virus scanner that lets you do this, would you consider not scanning "all files"? I usually set mine to scan program files only. Admittedly not as secure, but trade off of some security versus not bringing your machine to a grinding halt. Excluding your project folder won't always help... If you're doing web development, there's disk writes to \Temporary ASP.NET files\ and the page file.

Number 3: - a faster hard drive. (Probably only possible if this is your machine). I wrote a blog post with an analogy that might help clear this up. Instead of repeating it all, here's a link: http://codeoverview.com/blog/2009/08/faster-hdd/

Essentially I'm trying to say that if your antivirus is crippling you, you probably have a typical corporate PC (maybe with an extra boost of RAM) instead of a proper developer rig. Another poor artisan crippled by a one-size fits all spanner? I'd bet your hard drive isn't particularly better performing than the one in the receptionist's PC, just bigger (not trying to be snide against you Ian - just pointing out what I've frequently seen and it frustrates me)

Answer 8

I also dont have maesurements, but some experiences:

• Dont use McAfee: We had serious performance problems (and other more serious ones) on a number of installations with that.

• Use Avira AntiVir: Reportedly the highest success rates, and no noticeable delay. I use it since years.

Answer 9

I'd have to agree with the first answer.

I've seen such issues differ between jobs according to the verocity of the admins' intent to leave configs unchanged for devs. Correctly setup virus scanners still hinder dev, but at least it's bearable.

So I edit the scan lists to:

• Exclude all dev code directories
• Exclude Temporary ASP.Net gen'ed areas
• Exclude Resharper caches

I find this improves the disk thrashing that otherwise occurs with Visual Studio, Resharper and a Virus Scanner all hammering the drive. As always SysInternals' Filemon can help you target rogue services/processes.