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Giles
Contributor II
Message 11 of 21

Re: Memory leak on Mac OS 10.15.3 Catalina

I started a full scan from the Total protection Console - which appears to be the only way to see what is going on as activity logging is inadequate - and saw that it was scanning  the Time Machine Backup disk. I have excluded that volume from being scanned (settings->Full and custom scan settings) and the behaviour seems much better.

BAP
Contributor
Message 12 of 21

Re: Memory leak on Mac OS 10.15.3 Catalina

Giles,

Thanks for update. The memory leak occurs in the VShieldScanner intermittently on my MAC Mini about every two or three days. My Time Machine backup disk is a removable USB drive which is not attached unless I am backing up system. Yesterday, the leak occurred twice in one day while I was using the MAC. I got so frustrated, I uninstalled Total Protection. 

 

Giles
Contributor II
Message 13 of 21

Re: Memory leak on Mac OS 10.15.3 Catalina

My guess is that the scanner is a memory hog and that it gets out of hand when processing the Time Machine backup as I imagine there are millions of links or symlinks to the backed up files to avoid having multiple copies of unchanged files.

As I have 32 GB in my machine, scans of normal volumes allow the memory use to rise and then fall back on completion with hitting performance too much. The scanner still uses memory but not the extreme amounts it used when I first observed the problem.

VGavara
Contributor II
Message 14 of 21

Re: Memory leak on Mac OS 10.15.3 Catalina

Exactly the same behaviour here with:

  • Mcafee Total Protection 4.9.0.2
  • MacOS High Sierra (10.13.6)
  • 8GBytes RAM

VShieldScanner process exhausts the computer memory, and the only way of avoiding a computer lock is stopping the real time analysis or rebooting. Killing the process is useless, since it will respawn and will exhaust the memory again and again, no matter if you stop all your programs.

Described behaviour cannot be bound neither any specific action nor running program. Regarding Time Machine being the cause, I've added the Time Machine drive to the scan exclusion list with no positive results.

Tired of this problem, if there's no solution I won't renew my subscription again.

BAP
Contributor
Message 15 of 21

Re: Memory leak on Mac OS 10.15.3 Catalina

VGavara,

Inappropriate content? Thanks for update on your situation with McAfee Total Protection. I let my subscription expire, and removed app from both of my Windows computers. I will use Microsoft Defender on them. 

osalmon
Contributor II
Message 16 of 21

Re: Memory leak on Mac OS 10.15.3 Catalina

Is anyone looking into this?

I have the same issue. At some point, my computer gets extremely slow and I have to kill the Vshieldscanner process as it takes over 70GB of memory.

Note: Catalina version is now 10.15.7

2020-11-10_08-41-12.png

#bug 

VGavara
Contributor II
Message 17 of 21

Re: Memory leak on Mac OS 10.15.3 Catalina

Personally I haven't received any kind of feedback, it seems we're invisible for McAfee.

In the meantime I've been doing some tests and, as someone pointed in the past (and I denied), it seems to be a relationship between Time Machine and memory consumption problems: I use an external drive, always attached, for backups, and just for testing purposes from some weeks on I'm working without it always connected, so periodically I have to plug it in, making a backup and then unplugging it again. I've notice a drastic decrease in vshield failures since then.

Of course a) it is not practical and b) McAfee should be doing this stuff, not us. But for some of us, poor mortals that suffer the problem, maybe this is a temporary solution until the license expired and WE DIDN'T RENEW IT ANYMORE.

osalmon
Contributor II
Message 18 of 21

Re: Memory leak on Mac OS 10.15.3 Catalina

Well, I'm glad you have a workaround.

I don't have any external hard disk, so it won't work for me.

 

Where is the Time Machine backup file? Maybe we can exclude it from the scan?

Having said that, I'm pretty sure I store everything in the Cloud, so I'm not sure I have such file on my system ...

VGavara
Contributor II
Message 19 of 21

Re: Memory leak on Mac OS 10.15.3 Catalina

Nope, excluding the backup files from the scan list doesn't work, it's the first thing I tested... or at least it didn't work for me.

osalmon
Contributor II
Message 20 of 21

Re: Memory leak on Mac OS 10.15.3 Catalina

Got it resolved (fingers crossed) by upgrading to the latest version 4.9.0.2 (483)

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