Mac AV

[Nij.UK]

I was just wondering for all the Mac users out there what Antivirus software do you run on your Mac?

 

We use Sophos for Mac's and i dont want this to turn into a slagging session about sophos.....

 

Has anyone found that sophos is slowing down the performance of other apps, know the cause of this or a solution?

 

We have been getting a lot of cases reporting this on our help desk...

 

Cheers

 

Niraj

[Geoff]

How about ClamXAV?

 

http://www.clamxav.com

[Nij.UK]

we have this already on out servers so as part of defence in depth we decided to have different on clients

[Roberto]

I was just wondering for all the Mac users out there what Antivirus software do you run on your Mac?

 

We don't. There's a gui version of ClamAV on them for forms sake, but the boxes are very tightly locked down for end users, and we'll worry about virus protection when there's some there to protect against.

 

We use Sophos for Mac's and i dont want this to turn into a slagging session about sophos.....

 

Has anyone found that sophos is slowing down the performance of other apps, know the cause of this or a solution?

 

General "It's a bit slow..."?

This is part of the nature of virus scanners. This is what they all do. We tolerate it, perhaps never notice it, on a Windows box because we're used to it there but on a Mac AV is unusual (so people are not used to the slowdowns) and on the old PowerPC chips at least, the UI responsiveness always did feel a bit slow so small changes can make a big difference.

 

Specific "This machine is actually un-usable. Look, it takes 2 mins to open safari..."

First thing I'd check here is the AV settings. Is it set to scan every file, regardless of whether or not the file is likely to be infected (e.g. not much point in scanning text files, etc.)

 

Is it set to open archives and this is eating up disk and processors resources perhaps?

 

Are the apps giving you trouble Java apps, and the AV is set to always open and scan the contents of JAR files? (this is a good way to kill performance on a PC that uses Java apps, btw...)

[Rozzer]

Been using sophos for anti virus. But tbh its not really needed.

[Halfmad]

We used Virex on our macs although in all honesty I think we had 1 virus in 4 years - that was on 3000 macs.