[dba-Tech] Interesting Vipre behavior

Steve Erbach erbachs at gmail.com
Tue Mar 10 08:28:56 CDT 2009


Dear Group,

I've used Vipre for a few months on my system (Windows XP x64) and on
my wife's XP system.  Didn't have any problems ... until a couple of
days at the end of last week.

After what I'm about to describe happened a couple of times, I started
out after a fresh reboot by running SysInternals' Process Explorer
showing the Performance Graph for the SBAMSvc.exe service.

Then I'd start Thunderbird.  The performance graph for the Vipre
service would jump up to 50% CPU utilization (most of that was core
CPU).  Then, after email was downloaded, I'd click on any message to
read it and the CPU utilization would jump to 100%.  Most of that CPU
utilization (about 70%) was core CPU.

The CPU utilization stayed at 100% so I thought I'd shut down the
service using Process Explorer.  After having accomplished that and
seeing the CPU utilization plunge back to 0, I tried re-starting
Vipre; that is, I ran it from the Start menu instead of going into
Services and re-starting it from there.  Three times this happened:
complete system freeze.  No mouse, no keyboard, no disk activity...so
I hit the power switch.

After a couple days of this, I started my system back up and ran
Process Explorer and whatever else I run normally...and everything's
fine!  I didn't un-install anything; I didn't change anything in the
startup programs...Vipre just started working as it's supposed to.

I have an Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 3.0 MHz system w/8 GB of RAM.

My wife's system (Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 w/2 GB of RAM) has a
different problem.  She's got more disk space than I do...about 1300
GB, so a Vipre scan takes longer.  But on Feb.26 her Deep scan ran for
291 minutes.  That jumped to 459, 463, 470, and 463 minutes on March
2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th.  Then on March 6th it jumped to 1092 minutes!
(For what it's worth, my 244 minute scan on March 5th jumped to 488
minutes on March 6th for 500 MB of storage space).

Yesterday morning I woke up real early and saw that her Deep scan was
projected to take about 1100 minutes so I cancelled it.  I then set
the nightly scan to be a Quick scan, which took about 2-3 minutes.

I'm mainly venting and I'm happy that my system has settled down...but
I'd like my wife's system to run Deep scans at night that don't last
for 18 hours...and I don't know what to do about it.

Regards,

Steve Erbach
Neenah, WI
http://www.NeenahPolitics.com
http://www.TheTownCrank.com



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