100% CPU

[CV]

On an XP SP2 machine, installed MS AntiSpyware, at end of
install checked "launch...", did a scan, found a
gazillion hits, cleaned out everything, rebooted and all
went fine.

Then I wanted to customize, but as the interactive
portion of MS AntiSpyware comes up, the banner displays,
CPU goes through the roof and stay that way
indefinitely. TaskMgr says Spyware is chewing up an
additional 20-40KB per second. Then, after 10 minutes,
it came back to life, with a reduced memory footprint.

Within the "Realtime protection" and "Advanced Tools", no
problems. But as soon as I hit the "Spyware scan"
button, back into 100% CPU with incrementing memory
requests for about 1 minute, then back to normal.

Tried un/re-installing. Using NAV 2001.

Any hints as to where to start looking for reasons for
CPU hogging?

 

[Guest]

Late breaking news... Ran a second scan, no hits, but
thereafter invoking MS AntiSpyware was instantaneous and
no 100% CPU. Beats me !

 

[Bill Sanderson]

I've seen one post linking high cpu usage during a scan to a particular
antivirus--not the same one you are citing.

Thanks for keeping us posted.

 

[Guest]

On a hunch, I deleted the first scan history, which was
enormous; thereafter, no persistent 100% when invoking.

Could it be that MS AntiSpyware reviews/processes
previous logs (scan histories) before interacting with
the user? If so, there is room for improvement with that
task.

Difficult to further test since problem went away after
deleting very first scan log.

 

[Bill Sanderson]

That's still perhaps a very useful report--thanks for doing the detective
work and posting the result.

 

[Bill Sanderson]

I did notice something in the UI last night which may give insight into this
behavior.

When you bring up the scan page, the pane on the right reads:
something like:
-------------------------
Spyware Scan details
Estimated scan time:
Less than 2 minutes

The estimated scan time is based on past scans run on your system
---------------------------------
Before everybody exclaims about what a high performance system I have I
should point out that I dumped previous scan history some time yesterday
while looking at this issue. My full scans take around 39 minutes or so, as
I recall.

Anyway--the thought I take away from this statement is that the program
probably reads through the scan results before beginning a scan, and if you
see hangs at that time, deleting previous scan results might change that
behavior. However--there is a downside to this--those scan results may
include useful information about what was found and removed, and if there is
a chance you'd need to go back and look at that data, I wouldn't advise
blowing it away.