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Sophos dramatically slowing down Time Machine in OS X

Hello all!

We have 400 Macs running Sophos Enterprise for Mac and about 100 running time machine and had a lot of complains of Time Machine being very slow since two weeks ago. And very is slow is really slow. I investiged it a bit:

- Slow is like 500 MB per second, so a small 3 GB backup takes about 6 hours (over USB 3)

- Excluding the Time Machine Backup drive for on-acces-scanning (and then restarting the time machine backup) does not speed up anything at all

- When you turn off on-access-scanning, backup speed is increasing directly to normal. Yesterday, I was helping someone with a machine, TIme Machine had been running for over 2 hours and backed up 1,3 GB of a 30 gb backup. I turned of on access scanning and the whole backup was done in less then an hour. 

I hope this information is useful and Sophos will release an update where this bug is fixes quickly. Turning of On Access Scanning is not a solution because we need to keep our computers secure..... and we need Time Machine backups as well to keep data safe. Besides, clients without administrator rights cannot disable Sophos themselves. So at the moment, we manually have to disable sophos so people kan make backups, enable it so there computers are safe again... which is not very satisfying ;-)

- I suppose more people running Sophos on their Macs have encountered this problems?

- Is this issue known by Sophos and can someone confirm that the issue is being investigated?

- If there is any new information about a solution to this problem or when an update will solve this issue, I would love to hear it!

Kind Regards,

Marnix 



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  • Hi there..

    The Time Machine issue is a known problem which will be corrected in the the next version, 9.5.3, due now in mid to the end of October 2016.

    The Time Machine process (backupd) is making a call to the disk to read, which is intercepted and checking files, and only takes a few ms (milliseconds) for each scan. Time Machine however, as soon as there is any delay of even a few ms on the requested file, it is slowing down considerably, up to 90%.. So even thought we can serve it's files much faster, it is slowing itself down.

    There has been a change in the new version of Sophos in our driver, kext, at a very low level to purposely avoid Time Machine's process and no longer trigger a delay. Final testing for this is underway,  so the expected release will be shortly.

  • Thank you for this update! That's what I wanted to know! 

  • Yesterday, we were updated to 9.5.3, I tested at some computers and the Time Machine Issues are solved. Topic can be closed!

  • HI All, 

    The issue for this thread os resolved with Sophos AV version 9.5.3 and will be roll out to all customers by 31st Oct . Let us know if you still face the issue after this update . 

    Thanks and Regards

    Aditya Patel | Network and Security Engineer.

    Regards,

    Aditya Patel
    Global Escalation Support Engineer | Sophos Technical Support

    Knowledge Base  |  @SophosSupport | Sign up for SMS Alerts
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