System Information -- Norton Internet Security 2011 running with Win XP SP3 on a Dell Pent 4 2.66GHz processor and 1GB ram
ccsvchst starts shortly after booting and has such a high Disk I/O rate that nothing else can run until it completes. This morning its I/O read count was over 1.2 million and I/O writes was over 379K 37 minutes after the boot process started.
Does anyone know exactly what ccsvchst does and why would it have such high I/O counts? Are there any settings in NIS that I can use to reduce this I/O?
This has been an ongoing problem with the last several versions of NIS. Why can’t Norton design a system that is somewhat efficient?
After booting, you probably get an update which increases both reads and writes a lot. If virus definitions have been updated, you get a quick scan as soon as the system is idle, which drives it up further. Most of the I/O is from regular scanning of files - the basic antivirus function, then keeping track of what all the applications and services do, then checking network traffic.
Your numbers look normal; mine is at 3 million reads, 1.5 millions writes right now, 9 hours after booting the computer. It's a lot, and there is nothing special you can do to decrease that number, but Norton isn't the worst in the business at I/O. I have tried several other suites that double the number of writes Norton do. Turning off pulse updates might reduce the number of writes somewhat, but I haven't tried it so I can't say by how much. And you'd be reducing you protection a bit at the same time.
I also think the low amount of RAM you have might make it more noticable for you. Instead of loading stuff into RAM, the program would have to read and write more frequently to the hdd instead.