Mac OS Yosemite and Sophos for Mac ---slowing down my internet speeds

Hi Trosum,

If you find that your network is being drastically affected by SAV, you can try disabling live protection. 

You can do this after SAV is installed, go into preferences, disable live protection, then reboot.

Please give that a try and let me know how it goes!

Hi Trosum,

Leave web protection on for now - they are separate features. If you find that network performance is improved with live protection disabled, then we know that's where the issue was. 

The difference between the two is web protection scans websites for malicious content, whereas live protection is essentially a way for the endpoint software to have the most up to the second virus information from SophosLabs. Without it, you are still protected by the regular on access scanning as long as you keep SAV up to date. 

More info on how live protection works is available here.

well turning live protection didnt help. so i turned off web protection also, and that helped. So then i tried and turned live protection back on, and web protection on...and that helped me out as well. getting the speeds i need. and should be getting. will just having web protection off, will that help me even having sophos installed?

One thing you could try is testing the two different settings under Web Protection. See if you experience slow internet with the first option (URL reputation checks) disabled and the second (Malicious downloads) enabled. 

If that's the case, it could be worth looking at your DNS. Slow DNS can definitly impact the URL reputation feature.

DNS is bascially the service that translates www.sophos.com into a number that a computer can understand. Usually this is handled by your Internet Service provider and your router. Before you worry about switching it around, I'd suggest just toggling those options. 

well the only way i can get my sophos to work without affecting my internet speeds at all is to disable both functions of web protection. ive tried one way on, way off, and vice versa and that didnt work. so my only option is to either have web protection disabled or not have sophos installed at all...what do yall recommend at this point and iwth my situation??

Web Protection slowing down browsing has a number of posts on this forum.  I've included a link below to one that discusses why some users may see the problem but not all.

http://openforum.sophos.com/t5/Sophos-Anti-Virus-for-Mac-Home/Web-Protection-slows-Safari-website-loading-dramatically/m-p/13447#M6328

DNS (taking a human-readable site name and looking up the IP address that tells your computer exactly where it needs to go to) can be slower for some users.  When SAV has to look up a lots of addresses quickly, and domain name resolution is a bit slow, the browsing experience can be seen to be slow.  Hence a pre-existing problem shows up.  Note: It's not just one address that SAV has to look up.  For example, if you load amazon.com it's not just one address.  There are many many addresses the homepage (all pages on that site) connect to so the content loads in the sidebars etc.

If you don't get anywhere with investigating a slow DNS (the thread linked above has suggestions) you can choose to disable web protection.  Websites you connect to are not checked but you would still benefit from on-access and on-demand scanning locally on your computer, so if malware tries to save itself/run from your mac you're protected - the web protection is just trying to stop it ahead of spotting it locally.