Scan Time Going Up

[Larry]

My scans are run automatically every day at 11 AM. Until yesterday, they
always took 7 minutes (and always within a few seconds of each other),
yesterday's scan took 14 minutes and today's scan took 17 minutes. These
are all deep scans, and they all report approximately the same number of
memory threats detected, threat files detected and registry threats
detected. The link to "Full Details of (each) scan" shows no details, it
just says nothing was found. (That's a waste). Why the huge increase in scan
time? Got any suggestions or thoughts of what might be going on, or what I
could check. Thanks.

 

[Bill Sanderson]

Have the definitions changed over that time period?

 

[Larry]

No, I updated to 5689 on Saturday and had two 7 minute scans before the
increases started yesterday.

 

[Bill Sanderson]

What else is going on on the machine? If you disable real-time scanning by
your antivirus does the scan time change?

I don't see why Microsoft Antispyware's times would change so much just on
its own, so I'm inclined to look at other things happening on the machine.

 

[Larry]

Well, that's interesting. I disabled my McAfee AV and ran a manual scan
(with the same deep scan setting), and it ran in less than 4 minutes. It
showed the same number of memory threats detected and registry threats
detected, but only about half as many threat files detected. I'm still not
sure how I go about keeping the time down.

 

[Larry]

Well, I just re-enabled my McAfee AV and ran another manual scan. This one
took 5 1/2 minutes.

 

[Bill Sanderson]

What's going on that you have a significant number of threat files found?
Is it possible that the processes involved that are affecting performance
aren't those of legitimate apps you intend to be running?

 

[Larry]

Bill, I don't know how to answer your question. What should I do to
investigate and understand this? I ran a scan this morning, it had 16000
threat files detected, and ran in 6 minutes. My scheduled scan 3 hours later
found 32000 threat files and took 20 minutes. My wife may have been logged
on as another user when the scheduled;ed scan ran. Would that possibly
explain why the number of threats doubled? What should I check or try?

 

[Bill Sanderson]

Two new thoughts:

1) another thread has tied the issue of scan time increases when no other
obvious factor changes to the number of temp files. Clearing temp files
decreased the scan time for that poster.

start, all programs, accessories, system tools, disk cleanup is one way to
do this.

2) I would expect, most of the time, to see zero threat files at the end of
a given scan, if I were trying to keep the machine clean.

If you've got stuff you are leaving in place for a reason, setting it to
ignore always would make sense, perhaps?

 

[Larry]

Well, I ran it twice tonight. Both took 6 minutes. The first one was as is,
the second one was after doing a disk cleanup as you suggested. The cleanup
only deleted 50 Kb. Yes, I do see 0 threat files at the end of each scan.
Sometimes it's 0/16000 (files scanned) and othertimes it's 0/32000. So far I
haven't seen any rhyme or reason why scan times vary from 6 minutes to 20
minutes.
Larry

 

[Bill Sanderson]

Interesting. I don't know why that difference, either. You may be right to
associate it with fast user switching and having another user logged in,
perhaps.

 

[Larry]

Well, it ran in 7 minutes again today. I'm gonna quit worrying about it. The
only reason I posted in the first place was that times were going up, and I
hadn't seen any evidence that it would go down. Now I know that scan time is
random, between 6 and 20 minutes. Since it's stopped the continually
increasing behavior, I'm not concerned anymore. Thanks for holding my hand.