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Sophos dramatically slowing down Time Machine in OS X

MarnixKarssenberg

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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  • 0

    I'm having this problem as well, with about the same speed impact that you mention.  I'm running Sophos Cloud Endpoint, Version 9.5.2.  This has been driving me crazy trying to figure out why my Time Machine backups would never complete.  I hope somebody at Sophos is looking into this.

  • 0

    I'm also having this problem with Sophos Anti-Virus v9.5.2 running on OS X 10.9.5

  • 0

    Hello,


    we have the same observation on several Macs with Sophos 9.5.2 and either OS X 10.11 or 10.12.

    In one case it took 24 hours to backup 30 GB to a directly attached USB 3-Drive. With deactivated On-Access-Scan the rest (200 GB) have been backed up in some hours.

    It may be related to small files. A copy of a big VM (120GB with 4GB-Files) from one disk to another was done quite fast. A build of a WAR-File containing several thousand files is round about factor 5 slower with on-access-scan activated.

    From our observation this bottleneck was introduced with 9.5. With the version before it was not such a big issue.

    Regards,

    Thomas Kriener

  • 0
    Dear Sophos-people, Is there any update on this issue and when a fix will be released? The situation is not workable at the moment, leaving us the choice not to make backups, or not to have antivirus running on the machines. I know it can be some work fixing this but what we would love to hear is: - Are you working on an update fixing this problem? - When do you expect the update to be released? Please give us some more information instead of waiting, being unsure if it will be fixed at all. And if it will not be fixed soon, let us know so we can start looking other AVP's. Kind regards, Marnix Karssenberg
  • 0

    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.

  • 0 in reply to Jarly

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

  • 0 in reply to MarnixKarssenberg

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

  • 0 in reply to MarnixKarssenberg

    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
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