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wmcole
Contributor II
Message 1 of 8

McAfee Severe Performance Penalty

Booting to a point where applications respond within a 10 - 30 seconds of being clicked, or UI gadgets respond takes 13:39 (mm:ss) on average  but it is closer to 30 mins before the resources settle to allow use of more resource-intensive applications like photo editing apps.  

McAfee, according to Task Manager and Resource Monitor is responsible for beating the disk to death (100% utilization for the first 15 mins) and CPU (30% total for dual Xeon 8-core CPUs) during the same period and shows nearly 40 active processes all the time and I have all the cloud related services that McAfee allows me to control turned OFF. 

1. Is there a way to "tune" McAfee so that it does NOT bog down the system to such a great extent?  (BTW, it is WAY WORSE when a scheduled scan runs - forget about opening a browser page in less than a minute or even running a mildly complex application (like MS Word etc.)

2. If not, is there a malware protection package from another vendor that is way less of a resource hog?

The performance hit for McAfee had slowly gotten worse over the years, but once Intel took control it went up exponentially almost over night.  Also, in spite of not using McAfee VPN or cloud services, it seems McAfee not uploads tons of data from my machine, and only allows access to "Security Reports" through the Internet which means all that data is sent to and stored online (where it is vulnerable to compromise) and it all happened WITHOUT MY EXPRESS PERMISSION. (Just another "WTF" in dealing with McAfee, it seems.)

 

HP z840 workstation, windows 10 Pro 64-bit (fully up-to-date), 32 GB RAM, 2 TB system drive 48% free, 12 TB additional RAID storage, standard peripherals (monitor, keyboard, etc.).

7 Replies
Help_Everyone
Reliable Contributor
Reliable Contributor
Message 2 of 8

Re: McAfee Severe Performance Penalty

Do you use Enterprise mcafee? If it's consumer product, just try reinstall, most of the issues get fixed by a reinstall

wmcole
Contributor II
Message 3 of 8

Re: McAfee Severe Performance Penalty

I use McAfee Total Protection (consumer) with "App boost" On. "Web Boost" Off,, "Anti-Spam" Off, "VPN" Off.  I do not use nor have I "set up" the McAfee "Manage passwords",  "Protect my kids" or "Lock Private files" features.   I have a scheduled a full scan of the system drive once per week during an "off-peak" time.

I had  to do an install from scratch when McAfee forced me to "Total Protection" when I went to renew my "Internet Protection"  subscription.  Aside  from removing some controls (like disk / volume  or entire directory exclusions from different types of scans - I don't need to real-time scanning to interfere with media editing / playback files on my media drives) or wildcards to exclude an entire class of files like "*.tmp" or "*.bak" or "*.old" etc.  That in effect has taken away the means to "tune-up" scanning based on particular local, device-level risk assessment.

So while I will take your suggestion and try a re-install I doubt it will make any difference (except to the reboot between the uninstall and reinstall).  I think the problem is the bloatware created by extra logic designed to keep "dumb users" from exercising detailed control they used to have before the Intel takeover - bloatware that bangs the Internet connection to death as well as HDs and CPU trying to make decisions for me that I should be able to make myself.

Since the full uninstall / reinstall from scratch takes about 2 hours (at least that is what the "update" from the McAfee Internet Protection to the [Intel] McAfee Total Protection took) I will have to find a time in the schedule in a few days from now to do it, but I'll let you know what happens.

 

Peacekeeper
Message 4 of 8

Re: McAfee Severe Performance Penalty

Have to second help everyone's suggestion as mine has never had any performance issues. A while back there was a bug that caused this but it was cleared up ages ago. When you took of Internet Protection was that a Mcafee version as no name of such program. Internet security maybe.

 

Not withstanding that comment when you remove Mcafee follow this FAQ

How to remove McAfee

Reboot after windows removal and after running MCPR renoval tool. Run teh preinstall tool before reinstalling

Preinstall Tool

I have seen here posters having this issue but either their install was corrupted or another AV installed. I am unsure if App booster affects things as I do not run it.

Good luck.

PS the uninstall reinstall took me 20 Mins last time what is your Pc specs newest or old and OS?

wmcole
Contributor II
Message 5 of 8

Re: McAfee Severe Performance Penalty

Procedure:

  1. Go to my account, deactivate McAfee Total Protection (MTP) for the target machine.
  2. Windows control panel->programs and features: uninstall McAfee Total Protection and WebAdvisor by Mcafee.
  3. Reboot.  Turn on Windows Security options to replace MTP protections.
  4. Shutdown (power down), Power up.  (Boot time shortened by about 5 mins).
  5. Ran the MCPR tool.  It ran for about 15 mins and appeared to be removing loads of junk left behind by the initial uninstall procedure.
  6. Shutdown, Power up restart.
  7. Ran the Pre-install tool.
  8. Shutdown, Power up restart.
  9. Install MTP from fresh download from my account, and modify settings to those removed with the full uninstall procedures.
  10. shutdown, Power up restart.  Boot time shortened by 2 minutes (now about 11:30 mm:ss to complete, and stabilize so UI gadgets / windows respond within 2 sec to user input).

So those procedures did shave about 2 mins off the boot-to-reasonable user input response time, but it is still about 7 minutes longer than if I rely on Windows Security to replace the McAfee functions.  (Recall I am not using and VPN /Cloud services).

  1.  

 

Peacekeeper
Message 6 of 8

Re: McAfee Severe Performance Penalty

Very strange have you called support yet boot on mine a 2 year old I7 cpu is less than 1 minute.

Call McAfee support

wmcole
Contributor II
Message 7 of 8

Re: McAfee Severe Performance Penalty

You must have an SSD.  I have 7200 rpm sys drive, and it is 5:20 until the lock screen appears (where a key / mouse event causes the login / password entry box to appear).  All the time I can see the internet connection being beat to death and the system drive is maxed out at 100 % and remains so until about the 14 minute mark or longer.  The most specific info I can gather from Task Manager and Resource Monitor is that there are a TON of "System" and "Service Host:" processes interspersed with a dozen McAfee related processes going that alternate accounting for the continuous disk access once I get to a point where I can get even greatly delayed UI response.

The Event Log isn't much help (although it shows several McAfee service related timeouts of between 30000 and 45000 ms) as what I really want is a log of everything that starts and reads/writes to the SYS drive and the amounts it tries to read/write at every SYS drive access.  If I can have a log file  of this sort to sift through then maybe I can nail down the specific processes /  features that are the resource-hogs.

 

Peacekeeper
Message 8 of 8

Re: McAfee Severe Performance Penalty

Yes an SSD sorry haven't a bootable 7200rpm drive to test anymore.. In tools ie the gear icon startup settings are on fastest option? Next time I am over my daughter's place will check her boot time

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