I've seen many posts where people complain of SymDaemon using too much cpu. I'm not having that problem. Instead it is blowing out the ram. Running "top" on the command line yields:
I'm running Norton Internet Security 5 for Mac, Version 12.2 (76) on Mac OS 10.7.4 expanded from 2 gigs of ram to 8 (fortunately). If I still had the original 2 gigs SymDaemon would have totally blown out the ram and caused me to thrash to a halt with no other apps running! As it is, even expanded to 8 gigs I'm running out of ram with just a few apps open, and what's funny is that Activity Monitor doesn't show the culprit, only the "top" command. That's got to be a memory leak. Is there anything I can do short of disabling virus protection?
I ran some experiments. The last time I rebooted, it blew up to 1.3 gigs within a minute of start up. It held there for a couple of days, then yesterday when I woke up the machine in the morning, it jumped to 2.7 gigs, again within a minute of waking up. This morning it jumped to 3.89 gigs (I can send you a screen grab if necessary). As you recommended, I tried turning off "Automatic Virus Protection" (doesn't that leave me vulnerable?) and rebooted. Same thing, it blew up to 1.3 GB in just over a minute, and kept my CPU pegged at 100% for several minutes. I also tried to see if there was any correlation to the ram usage and what other apps where open. I run some pretty intensive 3D graphics software at times (houdini). There was no increase in SymDaemon's footprint while houdini was live, and houdini's footprint was smaller than SymDaemon's even with a fair amount of high res geometry in the scene. If a virus scanner is using more ram than 3D software, that can't be right!
I've seen many posts where people complain of SymDaemon using too much cpu. I'm not having that problem. Instead it is blowing out the ram. Running "top" on the command line yields:
I'm running Norton Internet Security 5 for Mac, Version 12.2 (76) on Mac OS 10.7.4 expanded from 2 gigs of ram to 8 (fortunately). If I still had the original 2 gigs SymDaemon would have totally blown out the ram and caused me to thrash to a halt with no other apps running! As it is, even expanded to 8 gigs I'm running out of ram with just a few apps open, and what's funny is that Activity Monitor doesn't show the culprit, only the "top" command. That's got to be a memory leak. Is there anything I can do short of disabling virus protection?
Today when I woke my computer, SymDaemon was using nearly 6GB. I tried something new, I force quit the process, and it immediately restarted itself and once again blew back up to 1.3 GB of ram in about a minute. It's getting to a point now that this virus protection has almost rendered my computer as useless as a virus would. If I can't even force quit it without it coming right back and hogging up all my ram, do I need to just uninstall it and find a different product?
Actually this memory usage is normal. Virtual memory is just that--virtual. Many applications use a lot of virtual memory because that includes all the memory used by things outisde of our control, such as all the code by the system frameworks. Virtual memory is moved into actual (physical) memory in chunks, when it's needed. The rest of the time the virtual memory is kept in the swap file.
Physical memory should be around 400MB-500MB for SymDaemon, which is enough memory to hold the antivirus definitions, the DeepSight list, the vulnerability proteciton signatures and other things we have to hold in memory. It may fluctuate higher and then lower.
We're working to improve performance in coming releases and hopefully we'll have more to share in that area soon.