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Kudos0

Norton consuming gigabytes of memory when installing Xcode updates (bug still not FIXED)

Posted: 14-Dec-2021 | 10:09AM · Edited: 14-Dec-2021 | 10:11AM · 5 Replies ·

This damn annoying bug exists since ages and you guys are still ignoring this bug. I had posted a thread a few months back and it went ignored. Norton consumes gigabytes of memory and causes CPU spike too when installing Xcode update, even slowing down the update process by minutes or even hours. I have posted a screenshot and FIX THIS BUG!
 

My system spec:

MacBook Pro 16

16 GB Ram

Norton 360 premium

Like I said before this bug exists since ages. So please fix it 

Labels: Auto-Protect, Kernel Panic, Norton Security for Mac

Replies

Kudos2 Stats

Re: Norton consuming gigabytes of memory when installing Xcode updates (bug still not FIXED)

Posted: 14-Dec-2021 | 5:18PM · Edited: 14-Dec-2021 | 5:31PM · Permalink

I wonder how much Norton is actually contributing to the slowness of Xcode installations. It's well known that Xcode installations have been taking longer and longer for the last few releases. Some observations.

I just installed the latest 13.2 update on my 8GB Mac Mini 2014 running Big Sur and Norton 360 8.7.2. While the com.symantec.mes.systemextension process does increase its size over time, a good chunk of memory and more importantly CPU time is taken up by the installd process. Both cores of my Mini were pretty well saturated during the install. But very little CPU time is being taken by the Norton extensions overall while the install is going on. Yes there are some peaks in its use of CPU but nowhere near what I would have expected to see.

I also saw the memory pressure graph dip for a while into the yellow zone, but not red (which would indicate severe memory oversubscription and disintegration into swap outs). installd was right up there with memory usage. Right now after all installs are over the memory pressure is solidly back into the "low green" category. And com.symantec.mes.systemextension is no longer at its peak of memory usage.

What I've heard says while the Xcode download is 10-14GB, the installer contains compressed payload with a boatload of files that are compressed up to 4x. Large CPU utilization on the installer would tend to make sense if those installation files are compressed. I have elected to configure Norton not to scan files in compressed archives. That could be helping both the CPU usage and the memory utilization of the Norton processes during the installation.  A large number of relatively small files are also a worst case for file I/O from experience.

Not to say that Norton couldn't do a better job with memory management as it's historically consumed a good chunk of memory. It's just that larger system memory configurations and macOS under the hood memory management voodoo may be masking over the impacts.

edit:  I mis-typed the Xcode version I installed. It's 13.2, not 12.2.

Kudos0

Re: Norton consuming gigabytes of memory when installing Xcode updates (bug still not FIXED)

Posted: 15-Dec-2021 | 2:38AM · Permalink

Well, I am using the default settings of Norton 360. I have noticed that sometimes it even takes more than 5 GB of memory while causing CPU spike for hours. Also if Norton is not disabled and you continue to use the system for various activities, I often notice kernel panic. So when installing Xcode updates, I just leave the machine as-is and close all other open apps. While it is obvious that it will slow down the installation but taking so much CPU cycles and memory continuously for hours is something they need to fix.

Kudos1 Stats

Re: Norton consuming gigabytes of memory when installing Xcode updates (bug still not FIXED)

Posted: 15-Dec-2021 | 7:17AM · Edited: 15-Dec-2021 | 7:21AM · Permalink

While I do not work for Norton, I did work with the Symantec AV products on Windows in a past life. Every once in a while we’d get reports of issues when when the product tried to scan files inside large archives (zip, rar, etc). Excessive CPU, excessive memory, even failures while scanning. The reason was that to scan the files inside the archive, the AV engine had to decompress the archive. That took both memory and CPU resource. The most reliable solution to the problem was to turn off this scanning. It didn’t seem to compromise our security as the files would be AV scanned when decompressed and written to disk with the associated archive utility. 
 

Given that the Xcode installer itself will spike CPU for hours, and contains compressed archives with lots of files, having Norton uncompress and scan those files then immediately scanning those same files again as they are written to disk is a waste of resource.  It’s likely if you’re using the default settings it’s set to to scan files inside compressed archives. I wonder if you’d see what I did if you turn off that setting for automatic scans?

Kudos0

Re: Norton consuming gigabytes of memory when installing Xcode updates (bug still not FIXED)

Posted: 16-Dec-2021 | 6:47AM · Permalink

Thanks for the suggestion, will try it next time.

Norton please fix your software!! 

Kudos0

Re: Norton consuming gigabytes of memory when installing Xcode updates (bug still not FIXED)

Posted: 03-Jan-2022 | 10:35AM · Permalink

This all makes sense:  

"...issues when the product tried to scan files inside large archives (zip, rar, etc). Excessive CPU, excessive memory, even failures while scanning. The reason was that to scan the files inside the archive, the AV engine had to decompress the archive. That took both memory and CPU resource. The most reliable solution to the problem was to turn off this scanning."

Based on that, the default recommended setting should have the Automatic Scans option off (unchecked):  

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