Almost every antivirus software for Mac OS X eats all available ram during scan!

[PicnicTutorials]

I have tried Sophos, Avast!, ClamXav, and Bitdefender. Each when I run a scan they take my Ram from 12GB to Near 0. And the ram remains gone once the scan is complete until I either restart or use a memory cleaner app. The only one that didn't do this was Webroot ($30 yearly) trial I used. Strangely there is not much on the web about this. I would think more would be screaming to the heavens about such atrocities. Do you all see the same behavior when using any of the above antivirus scans? Is there a fix for this? The above apps developers seem oblivious to this problem. If they all do it makes me think it may be a Mavericks issue.

 

[aristobrat]

I would think more would be screaming to the heavens about such atrocities.

I think you don't see much screaming about this because I think very few Mac users run anti-virus.

 

[MacDawg]

Why on earth would you use AV? smh

 

[BenTrovato]

Eset doesn't

 

[Alrescha]

Unused RAM is wasted RAM.

A.

 

[PicnicTutorials]

Well I guess I found out why no one seems to care. You all don't seem to care either. Why use a AV? Because it is relevant in today's day and age. The mac isn't this obscure rare bread anymore. Which means it's targeted more and more. If you have ever been infected with a bad virus then you know better. Better safe than sorry.

 

[BenTrovato]

Well I guess I found out why no one seems to care. You all don't seem to care either. Why use a AV? Because it is relevant in today's day and age. The mac isn't this obscure rare bread anymore. Which means it's targeted more and more. If you have ever been infected with a bad virus then you know better. Better safe than sorry.

Already said Eset doesn't eat up resources. No need to focus on posts where people don't care, some people do.

 

[PicnicTutorials]

Already said Eset doesn't eat up resources. No need to focus on posts where people don't care, some people do.

I thought eset was a typo and skipped over it. I'll look.

I haven't seen this mentioned in any AV round ups though. Not the best reviews for it.

 

[old-wiz]

Why even use an anti-virus when there are none in the wild?

Sophos, for one, makes your system less secure.

The only thing they find is windows viruses that are contained within e-mail attachments. Since windows viruses do nothing on osx, they can be ignored in e-mail attachments.

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Well I guess I found out why no one seems to care. You all don't seem to care either. Why use a AV? Because it is relevant in today's day and age. The mac isn't this obscure rare breed anymore. Which means it's targeted more and more. If you have ever been infected with a bad virus then you know better. Better safe than sorry.

It is a myth that macs have no been targeted because they were not as common.

However there has never been an osx virus. none. so there is no point in using anti-virus.

 

[PicnicTutorials]

How does Sophos make your OS X less secure?

 

[old-wiz]

How does Sophos make your OS X less secure?

Read GJStudios post about viruses --- there are two links to problems with sophos.

https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/9400648/

 

[aristobrat]

Well I guess I found out why no one seems to care. You all don't seem to care either. Why use a AV? Because it is relevant in today's day and age. The mac isn't this obscure rare bread anymore. Which means it's targeted more and more. If you have ever been infected with a bad virus then you know better. Better safe than sorry.

Just to play devil's advocate, you seem to be glossing over the in-built protections of Mac OS X (like Gatekeeper, App Sandbox, ASLR, scanning of downloads like music/pictures to see if an executable is hidden inside, and automatic scan/removal of known malware) and putting a lot of trust in unproven (in the sense that there's never been an OS X "virus", so nobody knows how well these programs will actually protect your Mac) third-party AV programs (that are notorious for affecting system performance, as you've noticed).

 

[jonesea]

Don't think your measuring RAM usage properly.

The kernel will keep the cache data active until something else wants more RAM and there is nothing available.

What you perceive as hogging memory, isn't. The kernel will use the RAM that's available, anything less is a waste of hardware.

 

[PicnicTutorials]

Don't think your measuring RAM usage properly.

The kernel will keep the cache data active until something else wants more RAM and there is nothing available.

What you perceive as hogging memory, isn't. The kernel will use the RAM that's available, anything less is a waste of hardware.

Well I have a memory cleaner up in my menu bar. it usually sits at around 12G available. When I run said apps it drops or near zero (like 100k or M or something). My mac is noticeably slower even after scan until I release the ram.

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Read GJStudios post about viruses --- there are two links to problems with sophos.

https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/9400648/

Thank you for the info. I will read over it. Note it is 4 years old though. Still I'm sure realavent but not as.

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on another note. Should I enable the OS X firewall? Or is that already built into my Motorola router? If so where do I look to confirm that?

 

[DeltaMac]

Memory "cleaners" are almost always a waste of effort on OS X.
The issue is not how much memory is used (free memory is wasted memory ), but if your Mac is actually affected by memory use - meaning that RAM is swapped out to the hard drive (page outs), and the system performance is noticeably affected.
If performance is not affected, then using all the memory is a Good Thing™
Why would you want it any other way?
If you are booted from an SSD, then even page outs may not particularly affect how you work, but will be very notable when you are booted to a spinning hard drive.

 

[Alrescha]

Well I have a memory cleaner up in my menu bar. it usually sits at around 12G available. When I run said apps it drops or near zero (like 100k or M or something).

You are just doing something manually that the OS would have done on its own.

My mini memory sits at 98% used all day, every day. That is the normal state of a Mac (or likely any Unix box) that is actively used. If you have a system with a lot of memory it just takes longer to get there.

A.

 

[PicnicTutorials]

You are just doing something manually that the OS would have done on its own.

My mini memory sits at 98% used all day, every day. That is the normal state of a Mac (or likely any Unix box) that is actively used. If you have a system with a lot of memory it just takes longer to get there.

A.

So your saying that the OS will make the memory available on its own? That's not what I see unless I restart. or use a memory cleaner.

 

[Alrescha]

So your saying that the OS will make the memory available on its own? That's not what I see unless I restart. or use a memory cleaner.

The OS will make whatever memory it *needs* available. It will never try to make lots of memory free because that is 1) a waste of CPU cycles and 2) a waste of memory.

Unix keeps everything it can in memory in case there is a need for it in the future. All you are doing with your memory cleaner is throwing away data that the OS has hoarded for future use. You could get lucky and clean up memory that the OS would have freed anyway, but it is not clear that it is worth anyone's time to do so.

As I said earlier, my mini sits at 98% memory used all the time. It is perfectly fine. There are times when I would like to have more memory (running a virtual machine, for instance), but I never need to babysit the OS in how it manages the memory it has.

A.

 

[PicnicTutorials]

20% of Macs tested were found to be carrying Windows malware
One in 36 Macs (2.7%) tested was found to be infected by Mac OS X malware

source http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/04/24/mac-malware-study/

 

[blueroom]

Not sure how much I trust an antivirus article written by an antivirus company. It also said Windows malware most likely sitting in the web cache, that not actually affecting OSX.

 

[aristobrat]

20% of Macs tested were found to be carrying Windows malware
One in 36 Macs (2.7%) tested was found to be infected by Mac OS X malware

source http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/04/24/mac-malware-study/

So that article's from 2012, when Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) was current. AFAIK, Lion didn't have any of the extra protection (that I mentioned above) built in. I'd be curious to see the infection rate on Macs running Mavericks.

Not sure how much I trust an antivirus article written by an antivirus company.

I was with them until they drew this conclusion:

"Parallels between rate of Macs carrying malware and level of Chlamydia infection amongst young people". lol

 

[notjustjay]

20% of Macs tested were found to be carrying Windows malware
One in 36 Macs (2.7%) tested was found to be infected by Mac OS X malware

source http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/04/24/mac-malware-study/

Ok, so Windows malware is a fair point. Sort of. You still need a Windows machine in order to actually GET infected by Windows malware. But say that you have a document that's been infected, then yes, if you then copy that document onto your Mac (email it, download it, whatever) and then pass it from your Mac to someone else running Windows, you could unwittingly infect the other Windows machine.

So if you want to run virus scanning software on your Mac so you can detect and clean Windows malware, that is legitimate.

But Mac malware? I don't worry about it. I keep my system firewall on, I don't download software from torrents or other shady places, and I'm good. Could that one day change? Of course. There's no reason why someone CAN'T write a virus that affects the Mac. But I will likely hear about the first Mac virus from MacRumors long before I'm actually at risk of catching it. If I somehow become the first Mac user with a virus infection, then I'll at least be world famous...

 

[DeltaMac]

Not sure if I can get the reference in that article about Chlamydia.

That article is nearly two years old, (long time in computer years) and the bulk of the malware was the flashback nastiness, which could be found on thousands of Macs at that time. Cleaned up by a combination of Apple providing auto-updates to the built-in Xprotect service, and also by updating (or even better removing) Flash from your Mac.
Does the built-in protection work perfectly? of course not…
Can you get malware of some kind, despite keeping your own AV software running continually? Of course…
I'm not saying your shouldn't protect yourself - far from it.
Best protection, is safe computing, through a variety of schemes that are frequently mentioned, even on this site.
I also predict that if you have never run an antivirus scan on your Mac, that a full scan will probably find something to report, with malware to blame - and more often than not, either a false positive, or just not threat.
What can you do?
...Safe computing… part of which is learning what the threats may be, and why you might be a target. (another part (IMHO) is NOT trusting what you do to some AV company's possible agenda… )

 

[Rampant.A.I.]

Why on earth would you use AV? smh

Don't drink the Cool Aid. Also, please don't "consider cleaning your Mac from junk". Macs don't need antivirus, the best AV software has always come built-in.

That's part of why we pay a premium to own them: No PC hassles!

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Ok, so Windows malware is a fair point. Sort of. You still need a Windows machine in order to actually GET infected by Windows malware. But say that you have a document that's been infected, then yes, if you then copy that document onto your Mac (email it, download it, whatever) and then pass it from your Mac to someone else running Windows, you could unwittingly infect the other Windows machine.



So if you want to run virus scanning software on your Mac so you can detect and clean Windows malware, that is legitimate.



But Mac malware? I don't worry about it. I keep my system firewall on, I don't download software from torrents or other shady places, and I'm good. Could that one day change? Of course. There's no reason why someone CAN'T write a virus that affects the Mac. But I will likely hear about the first Mac virus from MacRumors long before I'm actually at risk of catching it. If I somehow become the first Mac user with a virus infection, then I'll at least be world famous...

You're posting an advertising article from a Mac AV seller. Why would you take their advice over Apple's own website, unless you like throwing money away and running a slow machine?

 

[T'hain Esh Kelch]

Well I guess I found out why no one seems to care. You all don't seem to care either. Why use a AV? Because it is relevant in today's day and age. The mac isn't this obscure rare bread anymore. Which means it's targeted more and more. If you have ever been infected with a bad virus then you know better. Better safe than sorry.

With that argumentation you better protect your house against aliens. They are green or so I've heard.

No viruses in the wild = No reason to waste time and money. You can be for sure that one of the AV companies will alert people of a loose virus way before you'll attract it. And Apple has build in protection anyway.