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Bad disk access behavior when on-access scanning is enabled

Hello,

My engineering team uses Sophos Home on our workstations. We have discovered reproducible bad behavior in Sophos Home when on-access scanning is enabled.

  • syscalls that open files from the harddrive's filesystem are considerably slowed down when Sophos on-access scanning is enabled
  • The slow down only occurs when MacOS does not have the files cached. Executing "purge" will ensure it hits the slow path
  • The slow down is ~5x in these cases
  • For us this means that app startup time is slow because reading the couple-dozen megabytes of source from disk takes much longer than it should
  • Furthermore, adding our source folder to the Sophos "exclusions" directory list does not seem to change behavior

 

Thanks,

Gideon



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  • I would suggest the business edition if its for business, as it gives you much more control.

    On-access does slow down access slightly, We have the full SMC so not sure if these options are in the home edition, but we set

    Scan only executabe and other vulnerable files to ON
    Set exclusions for file extensions, in our case for any 'data' file we know does not need to be scanned, like Autocad and Photoshop files.

    and they seem to help.

    We also do not run on-access on our file servers, and instead run a full scheduled scan daily.

    Regards,
    Bohdan