Sophos 9.01 Memory Usage out of Control

Hi Stuart,

The improvement to "turn off" the processes related to unused features will only be available in version 9.2. That version goes to beta for our Sophos Cloud product line in the next four to six weeks, and will make its way to our Home Edition around June or July (depending on how stable it proves to be). In your example, switching off the two Web Protection features would shut down the following processes: ScanD, WebIntelligence, SXLD. Note that until version 9.3 (see below) ScanD is only used for web content scanning, which is why it can be safely shut down even if you leave the on-access scanning running.

Folding the scanning functionality together (combining Intercheck and ScanD) to eliminate the extra copy of the largest memory consumer happens in version 9.3, and that won't be ready until after the summer (in the northern hemisphere). Its a seriously large project as it involves a complete rewrite of large portions of the on-access scanning code. This should also reduce the size of the "SophosAntiVirus" process a the same time, due to other changes in scanning code. We'd hoped to do this sooner but other work has kept us busy.

I have no ability to guarantee the dates I mentioned above. Software engineering can be a somewhat unpredictable process, and we may need to rearrange schedules based on ever-changing events. But this same memory consumption issue affects all of our business customers too, so its a priority. Stay tuned.

Hi Stuart,

The improvement to "turn off" the processes related to unused features will only be available in version 9.2. That version goes to beta for our Sophos Cloud product line in the next four to six weeks, and will make its way to our Home Edition around June or July (depending on how stable it proves to be). In your example, switching off the two Web Protection features would shut down the following processes: ScanD, WebIntelligence, SXLD. Note that until version 9.3 (see below) ScanD is only used for web content scanning, which is why it can be safely shut down even if you leave the on-access scanning running.

Folding the scanning functionality together (combining Intercheck and ScanD) to eliminate the extra copy of the largest memory consumer happens in version 9.3, and that won't be ready until after the summer (in the northern hemisphere). Its a seriously large project as it involves a complete rewrite of large portions of the on-access scanning code. This should also reduce the size of the "SophosAntiVirus" process a the same time, due to other changes in scanning code. We'd hoped to do this sooner but other work has kept us busy.

I have no ability to guarantee the dates I mentioned above. Software engineering can be a somewhat unpredictable process, and we may need to rearrange schedules based on ever-changing events. But this same memory consumption issue affects all of our business customers too, so its a priority. Stay tuned.