Memory leak on Mac OS 10.15.3 Catalina

[Giles]

I'm running on a 32GB Mac mini with Catalina and I'm getting regular memory leaks in VShieldScanner. I've seen an instance consuming 70GB although I usually catch well before it gets to that size. When this occurs there will, typically, be six or so instances of VShieldscanner running with one showing multiple gigabytes of memory used while the others will be say 200MB. I usually kill all instances and will then be good for a day or two.

Does anybody else experience this, or is it a know bug?

Regards

Giles

[Karthik_K]

Hello @Giles 

VShieldScanner is a service responsible for McAfee scan.

Would like to know some more details to assist you further on this issue:

1. Amount of data occupied in Internal storage?
2. Installed McAfee version in the machine.
3. Does the service use more memory when open a specific software in your machine?
4. Does the service use more memory when during a scheduled scan?

To know more about scheduled scan, read this article How to confirm a scheduled scan ran successfully on a Mac

Regards,
Karthik K

[Giles]

Waiting for the leak to recur and then will look at internal data usage - but to avoid misunderstanding can you say specifically what you are looking for here.

Installed version of Total Protection is 4.8.0.0. (756).

I haven't seen a pattern w.r.t other running software - but for sure at least Safari, Firefox and Thunderbird will be running. I will take a look when the problem occurs.

Scheduled scan is weekly on Tuesday night - I will keep an eye on it.

Real time scanning is enabled.

[Giles]

screenshot showing VShieldScanner consuming in excess of 78GB.

Activity monitor showing VShieldScanner memory usage

Running apps at the time: Safari, Firefox, Thunderbird, XQuartz

[Giles]

Eventually the machine crashed and rebooted I believe this probably due to the memory leak, by which time CPU usage was around 24hours - i.e. 1 cpu running at around 100%..

[BAP]

Giles,

I have had this same problem since I installed McAfee Total Protection about a year ago on my late 2012 MAC Mini with 4 GB of RAM. I am currently running MacOS Catalina 10.15.4 with supplemental update, and Total Protection 4.8.0.0. Every 2-3 days, the VShieldscanner consumes all the free memory, rendering the system inoperable. I have contacted McAfee several times about this problem, and still have not heard of a solution. The problem is cleared by using the Activity Monitor to force kill the VShieldscanner process. Very frustrating, the amount of time spent to correct this problem.

BAP

[Giles]

Yes, I also have killed the task ion a number of occasions. I contacted McAfee support and they were pretty useless. The person I spoke to didn't know what a memory leak is, was unaware of any such problem existing, did'nt believe that the system would eventually crash and told me to uninstall and reinstall - which I've done to no avail. There was no attempt to investigate or obtain more information.

However after watching the problem via a manual full scan rather than a scheduled one I think I can keep  the leak within bounds by restricting the values that are scanned - particularly telling it to ignore my time machine volume.

[BAP]

Giles,

I am at the point where I'm thinking of taking Total Protection off the MAC Mini. Thanks for

your research.

BAP

[fourflatr]

Definitely not just you.

Same on my 2019 MacBook Pro. Same OS version, same Total Protection version.

Crash logs also point to VShield. It crashes my computer every 24 hours or so...

If McAfee could fix this that would be swell...

[BAP]

fourflatr,

The VShieldScanner memory leak just consumed 3.64 GB of 4 GB of RAM on my late 2012 MAC Mini.

It takes about 15 minutes to straighten out the problem, so that machine will work. I'm so

tied of this. I just ordered a new Macbook Pro 13 inch, with 2.0 GHz 10th gen processor, 16 GB

of RAM, and a 512 SSD. I will not be putting McAfee Total Protection on the new machine. 

BAP