We have PCMark for our synthetic tests, so we wanted to use three real, commonly traveled, and highly stuffed Web pages for our assessment of AV impact on real-time browsing. As you might expect, pages can vary considerably in how they integrate third-party elements, such as hosted video and banner ads. We suggest considering all three result sets together.



We can only make a few general statements in looking over these charts. First, we see that the clean configuration is almost always the fastest. This is to be expected. Only once, on the Disney home page, does a single product slip in with a slightly faster score, and we attribute this to temporary Internet congestion slightly skewing our clean config numbers.
Of the three charts, we prefer the Wall Street Journal results as being the pattern that most fit our expectations. It may be that Microsoft puts the least effort into advance page scanning and so reports back the fastest results of the AV contestants. We can debate whether the other products are simply slower and more cumbersome or if they do a more thorough job of applying reputation analysis and other factors to provide advance warning to users if needed. Either way, we like seeing that the AV products are doing something.
Is a 10-second slow-down worth worrying about? Yes. Believe it or not, a 10-second delay experienced 100 times in the course of a day means more than 16 extra minutes of sitting around waiting for pages to load. That’s an entire break time broken up so minutely that you have no time to actually enjoy the break. On the other hand, consider the potential time lost and heartbreak gained by picking up malware from an unscreened site. We’ll take the 16-minute loss and hope AV vendors can improve their scanning algorithms in the future.
- Antivirus Need...and Greed
- Contenders: AVG And GFI
- Contenders: Kaspersky And McAfee
- Contenders: Microsoft And Symantec
- How We Tested: Configuration
- How We Tested: Benchmarking
- Application Installation
- Boot Time
- Standby Time
- PCMark 7 Results
- PCMark 7 Results, Continued
- Web Page Load Time
- Scanning Time
- Do Antivirus Suites Have A Big Impact On Performance?
i think something is wrong with your numbers.
Also, the timing of this article was excellent. I had just been doing some research about what anti-virus software I should switch to, mainly based on performance, but I guess I just got all the information I needed.
I stopped using AV products on my personal systems back in 2003. Norton back then was god-awful on a Pentium 4 systems, seemingly crushing the life out of a system. Even with a first generation WD Raptor 36GB my P4 2.6 would choke not only with Norton, but also McAfee. I might not use AV software, but I do put it on my family members' systems when it doesn't kill performance. In that respect these modern solutions seem much better.
>>Apparently, this is somewhat like saying you can boil water at 230 degrees Fahrenheit instead of 260 degrees. As long as the water is at 212 degrees or higher, no one really cares.
i think something is wrong with your numbers.
I had kaspersky on my intel i7-920 system with a SSD app/boot drive, and kaspersky brought my system to it's knees compared to a clean system without any antivirus. It was like a computer from 7 years ago in it's response time. Try to install something? Took 10 seconds to start the pre-scan, then it would pre-scan and then install was slower. Run firefox from a fresh boot? Wait 3 seconds. 3 seconds? With a SSD?
I removed it and tried out norton internet security and everything is instant like my clean system. I don't even notice that I have it most of the time. I attribute that partially to my good system, but I attribute the other part to it not just adding arbitrary wait times onto everything I try to do. Use that processor! I have multiple more to spare!
I know people think dirty of Norton, but as long as it protects me while pretty much being invisible to my performance to the naked eye, I'll give the once slow kid in the class if he's a genius now. I don't know why, but it works.
Tom's something is wrong with your test bench.
If anyone is interested, I did ran my own tests for most of the latest security suites and have reached to the conclusion that Avast 6 is the fastest around. A scan on 10 GB of data on an SSD took ~2 minutes , compared to 8 minutes it that took Kaspersky to finish the same job.
I agree that Avira free should have also been included to balance the field a little bit.