McAfee VirusScan for Mac 8.6 Performance Issues

Hi joeclark;

Get rid of McAfee. It isn't need on OS X.

Allan

Hi,

Are you sure that it's not currently doing a background scan of the computer? Some antivirus software, when configured to do automatic periodic scans, will do them in the background without a visible progress window unless you explicitly open the app and see what it's doing. If this is not the case, I'd try reinstalling the app and reinstalling it.

Hope this helps,

Ken

Hi,

How long have you been experiencing this? If you had McAfee installed for quite some time, and the problem just began recently, then that would point to some external system change that may be causing the problem. If you had just installed McAfee and this problem started immediately, then it's probably some sort of problem with the McAfee software itself, and in this case, you might want to contact McAfee's tech support to see what they say. If your auditors only require that you are running some antivirus software, and not McAfee's in particular, you might want to try a different antivirus software app. I've been using Norton AntiVirus 11 (and before that, version 10), and despite what some people here say about Norton AntiVirus, it runs very nicely on my machine, updates itself quietly and with no popup progress windows, but lets me know if I access anything that may contain a virus. I am aware of prior versions of Norton AntiVirus that caused problems on Macs, and I believe that this is the source of so many people here not trusting it, but I've never had a problem with it. It does take a long time to initially scan my entire disk, though, but after that it runs very well.

Hope this helps,

Ken

Also, when you reinstall it, make sure that you get all of the available updates that are available. It's possible that there might be some bug in the version that you are initially loaded that may be remedied in a subsequent downloadable update.

Ken

We're seeing the same thing with VirusScan 8.6 on some of our PowerBooks running 10.4.11. Have you tried upgrading to 8.6.1?

I used to use McAfee virus scan on my mac but the performance of my ibook slowed to a crawl. Those processes take up quite a bit of cpu power. One thing you could try is disabling the On Access scanner. When this is turned on it scans files and process when they are used. But my best recommendation is completely uninstall McAfee and use something else like Intego or even better and cheaper, ClamXav. McAfee makes windows products and it's one mac product is definitely up to par.
Steve

We thought about tuning off On Access Scanner, but that kind of defeats the point of having VirusScan installed in the first place.

Unfortunately like the original poster, moving to another product isn't that easy as we get VirusScan for "free" as part of our Windows VirusScan license. I've opened a ticket with McAfee, and hopefully they'll be able to provide a fix.

Hi joelclark;

If your company paid for it then whining and moaning to McAfee about what a resource hog they have sound like a valid way to go. Isn't they why they have all of that technical support your company is paying for?

Allan

We've got a ticket open with them on the issue. If anyone else is paying for support, I encourage you to do the same.

Did you guys ever get this resolved? How did you resolve it?

I never had issues like this with McAfee VirusScan 8.6, so I wonder if joelclark was actually referring to 8.6.1. I recently started testing McAfee VirusScan 8.6.1 and had a similar experience to what joelclark described on a couple of machines: an iMac G5, and a 533 MHz Power Macintosh G4 with 512 MB RAM, both running Tiger.

On the iMac G5, the system became painfully slow immediately after upgrading from 8.6 to 8.6.1. After rebooting, the system seemed to be running normally, VirusScan 8.6.1 updated its definitions properly, etc., so I decided to leave 8.6.1 installed. This was a couple days ago and I haven't heard any complaints from the user, so I believe 8.6.1 is still running fine on that iMac G5.

On the PowerMac G4, the system was also unbearably slow after installing 8.6.1 (in this case, 8.6 had not been installed on the system previously). After restarting the system, the processor was still pegged at 100%. I opened the Terminal to investigate, ran the "top" command, and found that several instances of VShieldScanner (whose name is truncated to "VShieldSca" in top) were running and were responsible for the extreme processor utilization. I rebooted a few times after that, with the same results. I disabled On Access Scanning and restarted, but surprisingly that didn't fix the problem. I tried uninstalling 8.6.1, rebooting, and then reinstalling it, and that didn't resolve the problem either. Next, I let the machine sit idle (other than the top command and LoadInDock) for 45+ minutes thinking that perhaps VirusScan was actually doing something and would eventually finish its tasks, but it never did; in fact, it got worse! As many as 24 instances of the VShieldScanner process were running by the time I decided to give up and uninstall again. After I uninstalled VirusScan 8.6.1 that time, I rebooted and then installed 8.6 for the first time on that system. Right after installing 8.6, I was dismayed to see that the VShieldScanner processes were back and were hitting 100%, but I decided to restart, and this time the system went back down to normal processor utilization just a couple minutes after logging in. Right now it's idling at between 6% and 21% processor utilization, which is normal behavior.

I have an Intel Mac (MacBook Pro 2.0 GHz Core Duo with 2 GB RAM) running Tiger on which I could test 8.6.1, but I use that system a lot so I'm hesitant to install buggy anti-virus software on it. McAfee VirusScan 8.6 is currently installed on that system and it's running fine.

So to summarize, for the iMac G5 all it took to resolve the problem after installing 8.6.1 was to just *restart the system and wait patiently for it to reboot*. However, the only thing that resolved the problem on the PowerMac G4/533 was to *uninstall 8.6.1 and install 8.6 instead*. I haven't tested 8.6.1 on an Intel Mac yet.

Hope that helps!