Memory Leak

Hi Matt;

We aren't aware of any specific memory leaks in the Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac product. The first stage of running a scan through the GUI is to load the virus database from disk - this will cause the application to increase its memory footprint from 10 MB of real memory to 65 MB (approximately) in a relatively short amount of time. As the scan progresses through the files it was configured to scan, the memory footprint of the application may rise to as much as ~95 MB depending on how many folders you are scanning (*).

Once the scan has stopped, the application's memory footprint should go back to the state just after loading the virus data (the virus data remains in memory after the first time it is loaded). The memory footprint should always return to ~65 MB of real memory. Any scan run in sequence after that point should always return to that level assuming the application is not leaking any memory.

If you notice the memory footprint growing after a scan has been started and stopped multiple times, then please reply to this thread with how much memory is being leaked each time (approximately), and I will raise a defect to cover the issue.

Thanks,

David

(*) The maximum figure of 95 MB was observed when running a full scan of my 10.6 machine, which has about 800,000 local files spread across two volumes. The scan maintains a database of which areas of the disk it has visited before, so it doesn't try to scan the same area again after following any symlinks or aliases. This database has no upper size limit, so it will grow in proportion to the area being scanned until the scan completes.