Full Scan will not complete

I've had the same problem happen to me this morning. The items counter got down to 94800 and the program just stopped but didn't freeze. I have the same version and threat detection number as jshoughton. My iMac is a 2.4 GHz Core 2 duo with 2Gb RAM running OS X Lion.

However unlike jshoughton I haven't had an error message.

All help appreciated thanks.

Same to me.

I digged a little deeper and found that during the "hang" my hard drive space shrunk rapidly. I found that SAV was scanning a big compressed file by decompressing it into a temporary file (in /private/tmp directory).

I used Sloth (a gui for the lsof command) as root and watched the SophosAVAgent accessing the file. So you can find the big file it is processing. If the file is too big you can exclude it from the scan or just wait until SAV has processed it.

I don't know how to exclude files from the "Scan of all local drives" but I've created a custom scan of all Volumes (except my Time Machine volume) and excluded my big files (VMWare disks, some ISO images and my 55GB gzipped PC backup). So the scan now runs fine but with some pauses when SAV decompresses a some-MB file.

I have the impression that SAV is not very efficient on decompressing files. But this may be a tradeoff because SAV claims to "not slow you down" during a scan.

When the file is too big to decompress (maybe you're out of hard drive space), SAV may end with an error. But I haven't waited until my hard drive was full. :smileywink:

Hope it helps.

Update: You should exclude your iPhoto library too. SAV creates some increasingly big temp files during the scan of the library. Sophos should fix that behaviour.

Just to clarify, I am getting an error message box.  Also I can't see how disk space could be an issue for our computer as there is plenty of drive space free.  It is a computer used by my dad and he mostly uses it for microsoft office and photos.

After inspecting the log it there was a reference to an excel encypted file (which I believe is just a password protected document) that occured at the same time as the error box, but there is no reference to an error having occured.  Also when I scanned the listed file individually it scanned fine.

I haven't got an error message box. I was just curious about the "freezes".

Try to exclude the iPhoto library ... Maybe this fixes the problem ... or not.

Or report the bug to Sophos.

The problem file is likely to be one scanned shortly after the excel file.  Office XML files (xlsx, docx, etc) are archive files (they're really just zipped XML bundles), so it's possible you've got one that's corrupt ir is insanely large/ has a huge number of source files inside.

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jshoughton wrote:

Just to clarify, I am getting an error message box.  Also I can't see how disk space could be an issue for our computer as there is plenty of drive space free.  It is a computer used by my dad and he mostly uses it for microsoft office and photos.

After inspecting the log it there was a reference to an excel encypted file (which I believe is just a password protected document) that occured at the same time as the error box, but there is no reference to an error having occured.  Also when I scanned the listed file individually it scanned fine.

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I have now run the full scan with archive scanning disabled, and it has completed successfully.  However, the problem has only occured after the upgrade to Lion, and as far as I'm aware there are no new archive files that could cause the problem.  Prior to the Lion update the full scan worked fine with archive scanning enabled.  I will try scanning the excel documents seperately to see if there is a particular one that is tripping it up.

Success, after a bit of investigation I have been able to complete a full system scan with archives checked! After careful construction of custom scans, I narrowed down where the problem was and discovered a single file was tripping up the scan:

fmp_trial_fm_11.0.2.220.dmg - A trial of File Maker Pro v11 from www.filemaker.com

Having moved this file off the mac drive the scan completed successfully, however, this file has been on the drive for many months and has not caused a problem until after upgrading to Lion.  I have tried scanning the file on my laptop as well and it has the same problem (It is also recently upgraded to Lion).  Unfortunately I cannot scan it on a pre lion OS X.

I hope this information is useful to the developers as an example of a file that causes my initial problem!

Thank you!  We should be able to do further tests using that file.

Same problem as you: No problem with Leopard, but with Lion, Sophos is hanging up halfway through the scan + error message.

I did have the same FileMaker installation file. I removed it, along with other downloads, but the problem remains... 

So, it must be another file?

Would one of you be able to contact me about providing the filemaker file?  I've tested with the currently available version and have found no issues.

If you want to dig into what's causing the hangup and have a bit of technical know-how, you can run lsof from the terminal, or Sloth, a front-end for lsof, to see what file is opened just before the error message.