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epsilon
Former Member
Message 31 of 43

Re: Full Scan Slows/Hangs on big avis

Hello again,

Well. I see many posts in this forum about slow scanning but, as far as I can tell, there's not much progress in finding a solution.  I still have to keep all of my large avi files whitelisted and that brings the scan time to a manageable length (for overnight scanning).  Has there been any concrete progress in this area?

One thing which perhaps hasn't been brought out strongly here is that, In the past, scanning only took a proportion of my CPU time and there were plenty of resource left to do other things in parallel, whilst a scan was in progress.  Now, when it's scanning any of these files which cause it to slow down (even the small ones), the PC becomes unusable.  The scan not only becomes slow overall but whenever it hits a file which slows it down, it hangs up and stops responding to user input until it has got out of whatever peculiar state it's in.

This was brought home to me yesterday when, a while after midnight (which is when I schedule my scans to start), something occurred to me that I wanted to check on before going to bed.  By this stage, the scan had got into the sequence of thousands of small avis which I have, many of which seem to cause these scanning glitches.  Every time it hit a slow-down, the PC ceased to respond to the keyboard for typically between 10 seconds and 1 minute.  I could work only in the gaps of a few seconds between hang-ups.  I gave up and went to bed.

As noted previously, the offending files can be scanned without any difficulty on an individual basis.  It's only when in a full/custom type scan that they cause problems.  Also, by running Task Manager in parallel with a scan, I can see that, whilst in the hung-up state, CPU activity is very low.  My disk access light, on the other had, is on continuously.

This all started with a particular update a few weeks ago.  I'm surprised that McAfee are unable to track down the problem as I should have thought the symptoms and timing would narrow down the possible causes pretty well.  Are they still investigating the problem?

Regards,

Peacekeeper
Message 32 of 43

Re: Full Scan Slows/Hangs on big avis

I assume you have got the 2011 version by now i.e. the 1 with a 11.** security center and "about" in top right of the screen.

If so you open scheduled scan settings and exclude your avi folder.  Then do a scan of the folder to ensure no virii . You can do the same with custom scan but note full scan and Real time scanning will do them.

In this version scanning is 100% faster as it scans in two threads.

I have this issue in win 7 backup files i.e. hundreds of small zip files i do as I mentioned above and scanning is faster.

Yes a multi Gb avi will slow it down as will a 4Gb exe. We passed this worry on.

Message was edited by: Peacekeeper typos on 30/07/11 7:28:28 PM
darkpath
Former Member
Message 33 of 43

Re: Full Scan Slows/Hangs on big avis

   Yeah, I kept thinking they would get it fixed faster also. I ended up moving a bunch of my files off (which I should not have had to do) to external drives. I now have a 1tb drive and 500gb drive in my system but if I have more then 200 gb in files, scan will take longer than an over night. I have done like you said epsilon before, started ascan and then wanted to do something and the pc is unresponsive even though its showing little cpu useage. I take an puase the scan which also takes a few minutes becuase the pc is almost locked up and then do what i want before resuming. It used to scan all my files in the backgroun din less than 30 minutes and I would not even notice it. But now its more of a pain. I usually cancle the scheduled scan and then do a full myself telling my pc it can not sleep and running it for the night. My sleep timer is usually an hour and it used to beat taht easy but not anymore.

   I am acually pretty pissed this started happiening right after I bought 7 licenses and put it on every pc in the house. They do not expire until april of next year. But this is the last year I will use Mcafee.

epsilon
Former Member
Message 34 of 43

Re: Full Scan Slows/Hangs on big avis

Hi again, Tony,

Re. your point about the 2011 version.  I believe the problem started for me when the 2011 version arrived.  If the slow scanning is after a nominal doubling of the scan speed then what would it have been like without that?  I think it would have taken my PC a week to complete a full scan of everything !!

So it seems to get scans within a sensible timeframe I've got to whitelist all my large avi files and then, if I want the PC to be usable for anything else while scanning, I've got to exclude all of the folders containing my smaller avis.  If we carry on with this reasoning, I'll soon have to exclude everything from my scheduled scans to make them work properly.

I appreciate that you're just doing your best to help, putting forward some useful work-arounds but I'm sure you agree that this approach is not really a viable long term solution and, bearing in mind that, (a) until a few weeks ago, everything seemed to be working fine, and (b) my 'problem' files can still be scanned perfectly well individually, the problem cannot be fundamental to the scanning process and so it surely isn't too much to expect that McAfee could investigate what they've done to break their scheduled scanning software and put it right.

You suggest that a 4GB exe will slow things down significantly.  That's a bit worrying because my largest avi file runs to over 60GB and I've several that exceed 20GB.  Certainly don't want to be including those in a scheduled scan at the moment !

darkpath:  Nice to hear from you again.  That's tough that the problems came up so soon after you committed to McAfee on all your PCs.  My renewal comes up in a couple of months so I'm going to be taking some decisions fairly soon about the way ahead.  I am also experiencing other recent McAfee-related issues (covered in another thread - had a bit of a rant there a couple of days ago so I don't want to turn this into another one)  so I have to admit that, at the moment it's not looking good for McAfee but I'll wait and see how things progress for a few weeks before I finally decide.

Regards to you both.

Peacekeeper
Message 35 of 43

Re: Full Scan Slows/Hangs on big avis

Yeah we mentioned it to Mcafee techs manytimes but I would have thought placing them (big avis) in a folder after scanning them and excluding the folder from custom and scheduled scans would be sufficient

graemew
Former Member
Message 36 of 43

Re: Full Scan Slows/Hangs on big avis

Just to throw in my fourpennyworth:  I distribute my own AutoCad training disks as part of my courseware. These comprise dozens of AVI files (three dvds worth). Having been on sabatical in June and July I hadn't needed to create (and scan) any new disks but lo and behold when I tried a couple of days ago all hell let loose with never ending scans and pc lock ups.

Having found this thread I avoided the problem using AVG on an old laptop.

Now a friend is complaining of an issue with WFP (which you document elsewhere) I am not too happy at the moment.

As far as I'm concerned this is a serious issue with Mcafee which I hope they are goig to resolve otherwise I have to ask if they really care?

ylla
Former Member
Message 37 of 43

Re: Full Scan Slows/Hangs on big avis

I have the same problem (very slow scan and computer hangs) with the avi files, and there are not large files at all. I think it happens with another kind of files too, as some compressed files. It happens since one or two months ago, so I guess that it's because of an update. The technical service adviced me excluding from the scan the folders where these files are, but I think this is not a solution.

El mensaje fue editado por: ylla on 20/08/11 8:20:02 CDT
Peacekeeper
Message 38 of 43

Re: Full Scan Slows/Hangs on big avis

If you scan the folder once and scan any file added to it you do not open your self for infections. So excluding the file and folders speeds things up. Besides Real time scanner scans all files prior to opening.

Also ensure use minimal resources is not selected.

I have 40Gb photos on 1 of my drives and these slow scans down as do windows 7 backup files. All these once scanned are excluded. This feature iof 2011 version is 1 we mods have beem trying to get added back in and it works well.

The scanning is multi threaded so is two times as fast as 2010 version.

graemew
Former Member
Message 39 of 43

Re: Full Scan Slows/Hangs on big avis

THe inability to scan avi files still seems to exist. Is this going to be resolved any time soon?

Peacekeeper
Message 40 of 43

Re: Full Scan Slows/Hangs on big avis

I really do not think Mcafee is worrying as you can exclude thes files and folders from custom and scheduled scans.

The new 2012 version might work different I will be testing it soon.

Just scanned my avi folder 350Mb to 1.2Gb files mainly Tv shows and it scanned fast.

Are you excluding the files and folders? Of course this assume you have 2011 version

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