Slowdown of Microsoft Visual Studio due to differe

Question

What is the least slow Virus scanner to use with Microsoft Visual Studio

I have just had Microsoft Visual Studio “go slow” on me again due to my Virus Checker… (100s of Projects, some with over 100 C# files in them, so any thing that slows down builds is bad.)

We all know that development tools do a lot of file access so are badly effect by Virus Scanner. Most of us have to run a Virus scanner due to do many reasons.

So has anyone measured the effect of different virus scanners (and settings) on the speed of Microsoft Visual Studio?

Has anyone tied Microsoft Security Essentials with Visual Studio?

See also (if you have the rep, please extend the list)

• What Really Slows Windows Down (This has some real data)
• Visual Studio and Virus Scan of Temp folder
• Visual Studio Optimizations
• Development machines and anti-virus policy (Sophos Anti-Virus)
• Antivirus (Symantec Endpoint) configuration for developer machine
• Least intrusive antivirus software for development PC?
• Suggestions for a productive hardware setup with excellent virus protection.
• Choosing Anti-Anti-Virus Software (Coding Horror)

What are peoples experiences with Visual Studio 2010 and virus checkers?

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I got this as part of a helpful email from someone (that will rename nameless) at Microsoft speaking on his own behalf.

It’s not clear that we (Microsoft) would be able to endorse 3rd party products. With that in mind, I did notice that in the posting Ian linked to (this question) that Computer Associates was listed by someone as one of the best performing virus checkers for development environments, which interestingly enough is a product that I believe many Microsoft developers use on their desktops.

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Since asking this question, I have had the least problems with Microsoft Security Essentials, however I have no facts or measurments to back this up.

Answer 1

I also dont have maesurements, but some experiences:

• Dont use McAfee: We had serious performance problems (and other more serious ones) on a number of installations with that.

• Use Avira AntiVir: Reportedly the highest success rates, and no noticeable delay. I use it since years.

Answer 2

Don't use Kaspersky(The old Tect Review one) it slows down normal explorer file opening for almost 10 second(Yes, you need to wait 10 second before opening each folder). And yes it affects Visual Studio. The new version does not seem the have the problem. NOD32 seem to not have this problem, and is a bit faster than Kaspersky(I don't even know if it's scan as much as Kaspersky does).

But for what ever reason, NOD32 firewall is bad!

Answer 3

Having Fusion assembly binding logging enabled in combination with a virus scanner can result in performance problems during startup of an application. Either disable the Fusion logging or add the folder that it logs to as an exclusion in your virus scanner.

Answer 4

Would comment on answers from @MagnusJohannsson or @Rodrigo but don't have enough reputation. Just to agree really, and +1 for both.

I have NOD32 4.x on two very similar machines, 2nd Gen intel SSD's plenty of RAM, Duo / Quad Core's overclocked, clean installs of win 7, VS2010.

Have used NOD32 for years on many different boxes and many different builds without any problems, but had a horrible issue on one of the machines after a hardware upgrade and reinstall of OS where ekrn.exe (NOD's service) would go nuts and just eat up all the CPU leaving me having to physically shutdown the box.

After lots of to and fro with ESET support it was decided it was due to Visual Studio file access looking suspicious / being to quick, and in the end I excluded my project folders, and since then has been fine. Interestingly was project folder for a solution I was not using at the time, so maybe a TFS thing?

Anyhow this link is a simple guide for anyone having same problem with NOD32's ekrn.exe eating CPU

Excluding files or folders from real time scans

Answer 5

Well to be honest, my work machine doesn't have a virus scanner installed, and for almost 2 years, I've never had a problem with viruses because I'm constantly behind corporate web patrol and other things keeps me pretty safe.

At home, though, I use NOD32, and on 3 different machines all using Visual Studio, I've never noticed any slowdowns. I apologize for not having any benchmarks to measure, just wanted to throw out my "answer."

Answer 6

Based on previous installations at various jobs, empirically rated from slowest (very annoying) to quickest (almost no impact):

• Symantec (awful)
• McAfee
• AVG
• ESET
• Computer Associates (excellent)

I wouldn't bother with the speed tests, etc. shown at the AV review sites since most of these are in controlled environments, often with review-mode enabled. The impact will also vary depending on your network environment (workgroup or domain) and administrator-enforced policies.

Disclosure: I used to work on another now-obsolete anti-virus package back in the 90's.