sophos 3.66 to 3.67, load jumps?

[Marco Obaid]

I just spoke with Sophos about this issue and I am attaching their response.
One interesting note about my conversation with the tech support person is that
he did not want me to call my issue a "problem with Sophos". He repeatedly said
that the performance jump is due to providing "BETTER" protection. I will let
you read their repsponse.

----- Forwarded message from mark.danus at sophos.com -----
    Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2003 12:54:44 -0500
 Subject: Unix performance issues
      To: marco at muw.edu

Version 3.67 of SAV on non-windows platform sees a big jump in engine
capabilities. In particular it contains plug-ins enabling thorough scans of
four common file types - pdf, rtf, elf (Linux/BSD binaries) and .class
(java 'executables').

Addition of these plug-ins means that the engine is doing more work to
provide better protection.

As a result of this some customers may report significant increases in the
time taken to scan their file systems. Increases will very according to the
number and proportion of the file types mentioned above. The extreme
example is scanning a set of files consisting solely of pdfs, rtfs, elf
binaries and java files. In this case the scan time increases by a factor
of just over 3 (60 minutes -> minutes).

If you receive calls from customers complaining of scans taking longer to
complete or SAVI applications having to work harder than usual, it is more
than likely down to these issues.

The important thing to remember is that the slowdown is due to the
increased level of protection that we need to provide given the continuing
growth in the number of different file types that can carry viruses.

It is possible to disable these for options when using sweep by adding the
following command-line arguments:

-nopt=Pdf
-nopt=Elf
-nopt=Rtf
-nopt=Java

don't forget that use of any of these options may seriously impact our
ability to detect viruses in those types of file.

Regards,

MGD


----- End forwarded message -----


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