I've been having problems with my PC crashing during NIS 2009 full idle background scans. I may have solved the problem by disabling realtime protection of other anti-malware programs that were installed on my PC (i.e., Lavasoft Ad-Aware AE and Malwarebyte's Anti-Malware), but while I was troubleshooting I found several posts in this forum suggesting that memory usage by Symantec Service Framework (ccSvcHst.exe) is the main cause of PCs crashing during NIS 2009 idle background scans.
I found a similar thread in the NIS 2010 Beta forum ("Massive RAM Usage", see post at http://community.norton.com/norton/board/message?board.id=nis2010_pb&thread.id=1226) where beta testers reported ccSvcHst.exe using large amounts of memory (> 200 MB). It looks like Symantec may have resolved the problem for the NIS 2010 beta fairly quickly with a patch.
I ran a few full manual scans with both NIS 2009 (image A) and Malwarebyte's Anti-Malware (MBAM) (image B) while running the Windows process monitor (Windows Task Manager | Performance | Resource Monitor). I noticed that my CPU usage sometimes reached 100% during NIS 2009 scans (ccSvcHst.exe accounted for about 95% of that total usage), while CPU usage during MBAM scans rarely exceeded 30% and peaked once at about 50%. Image C shows a screenshot of Resource Monitor on my PC when no scans are running.
So here's my question. Does anyone know if Symantec is currently investigating the problem of ccSvcHst.exe using excessive CPU memory in NIS 2009?
I'm still worried about my system crashing during an idle background scan (I had to shut off the power to re-boot because ctrl-alt-del didn't work whenever this happened) and don't want to have to wait until NIS 2010 is officially released to see if memory management has improved.
Please note that my PC froze during NIS 2009 full idle background scans and has never crashed during a full scan run manually from "Scan Now" on the main NIS screen, so I don't know if CPU usage ever reaches 100% during idle scans.
Here's the pertinent information about my current system:
- HP dv6835ca Pavilion notebook PC (3 GB RAM, Intel 1.83 GHz Core Duo T5550 processor, 2 MB L2 cache)
- Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium v. 6.0.6002 SP2 (32-bit)
- NIS 2009 v. 16.5.0.135
- Norton SystemWorks Basic 2009 v. 12.0.1 (not loaded at startup)
- MBAM v. 1.39 (not loaded at startup, automatic updates and quick scans disabled)
- Microsoft Windows Defender always disabled by NIS 2009 at startup (which annoys me to no end)
A. NIS 2009 Full Manual Scan (not background idle scan)
B. MBAM Full Manual Scan
C. System Idle - No Scans Running
