I have McAfee Internet Protection for Mac installed. I noticed that a VShieldScanner process is constantly going to 100% CPU and makes my Macbook Pro sound like a jet engine. I have re-installed it multiple times and it ALWASY goes back to doing this. I have disabled scheduled scan to eliminate that as the culprit. I only have Real-Time Scanning enabled (as well as automatic updates). I have the following settings for Real-Time Scanning:
Scan files while: Write
Maximum Scan Time (in Seconds): 10
Set to clear and quarantine any virus or spyware, then I have none of the "Also scan" options checked. That means it won't go into archives or scan Apple mail messages or Network volumes.
I have Excluded:
/Users/tpl/Library/Mail
/Volumes
/Users/tpl/Documents/Virtual Machines.localized
/Volumes/com.apple.TimeMachine.localsnapshots
When VShieldScanner is at 100%, I ran a dtruss against that process and I see it is scanning every single file in /System/Volumes/Data/Users/tpl/Library/Mail/* . Unless Mail.app is writing to every single one of the 7.8G of emails I have on my system, there is no reason the scanner should be looking at those files. I just looked at a few of the ones I saw from dtruss and those files haven't been modified since 2019, so it should NOT have even been looked at.
I would like to exclude those files from being scanned, but McAfee doesn't seem to be able to add the overlay filesystem (/System/Volumes/Data/) to the Exclude list or how to tell it to ONLY scan files that are being written. How can I do that so my system isn't constantly scanning. I would remove McAfee but my work requires that an anti-virus be installed to connect to our VPN. Or of someone knows of a better AV solution that doesn't push CPU usage to 100% most of the time, I would be glad to check that out.
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