Serious Discussion What's your Antivirus/Internet Security memory usage?

[ErzCrz]

When I used Emsisoft it used about 600mb ram but ram usage is a good thing and not always the reason your system slows. Emsisoft Why Antivirus uses so much RAM.

Will post mine later but below is regular CIS usage.

 

[darth]

Feels like everyone is getting fooled by low idle CPU and memory usage.

What about peak usage or usage overtime? This is Windows Defender with peak memory usage of ~800 MB

 

[superleeds27]

View attachment 287108

Still rocking Eset I see

 

[Vitali Ortzi]

Feels like everyone is getting fooled by low idle CPU and memory usage.
View attachment 287112
What about peak usage or usage overtime? This is Windows Defender with peak memory usage of ~800 MB
View attachment 287113

that's very useful and the ESET peak is not much less but thank fully ESET allows more ram than defender when the system requires it (500mb for eset peak on my system )
cpu time is pretty low and from my subjective experience the system is lighter then with defender even with a few security programs installed
View attachment 287115

 

[Moonhorse]

 

[Vitali Ortzi]

When I used Emsisoft it used about 600mb ram but ram usage is a good thing and not always the reason your system slows. Emsisoft Why Antivirus uses so much RAM.

Will post mine later but below is regular CIS usage.

View attachment 287111

seems like i do waste a lot of io
but eset takes the most of the io usage

 

[bazang]

that's very useful and the ESET peak is not much less but thank fully ESET allows more ram than defender when the system requires it (500mb for eset peak on my system )

ESET uses methods to minimize or hide total RAM usage.

When I used Emsisoft it used about 600mb ram but ram usage is a good thing and not always the reason your system slows. Emsisoft Why Antivirus uses so much RAM.

Only when a system reaches 100% RAM usage does use of RAM slow the system down.

Large RAM usage itself by any process never slows down hardware.

If anyone buys a system with 32, 64, 128 GB of RAM - then they want that system to use at least 75% of RAM all the time (24, 48, 96 GAB RAM) otherwise they are just wasting their money and available resources.

Lower RAM usage does not translate to a faster system; Higher RAM usage does not translate to a slower system.

 

[ErzCrz]

MD, CyberLock, DefenderUI, WFC

A fair bit over time combined 706mb but 426ish normal and no noticeable slowdown with 16gig ram Had been considering dropping WFC but we'll see how CL Smart Firewall develops and good news is those rules are detected by WFC and in the rules list

 

[Vitali Ortzi]

ESET uses methods to minimize or hide total RAM usage.


Only when a system reaches 100% RAM usage does use of RAM slow the system down.

Large RAM usage itself by any process never slows down hardware.

If anyone buys a system with 32, 64, 128 GB of RAM - then they want that system to use at least 75% of RAM all the time (24, 48, 96 GAB RAM) otherwise they are just wasting their money and available resources.

Lower RAM usage does not translate to a faster system; Higher RAM usage does not translate to a slower system.

How can I check how much ram it will use under a state where it's starving and to check that should I temporarily disable memory compression?
Btw another question since I'm using multiple firewalls what issues can it cause as I don't see any slower network speed in tests and haven't encountered lower network speeds in my use cases (I have exclusions etc in place )

 

[CyberDevil]

ESET uses methods to minimize or hide total RAM usage.

I wouldn't say he hides much.

 

[Harputlu]

windows 11 Sophos home premium

 

[bazang]

How can I check how much ram it will use under a state where it's starving and to check that should I temporarily disable memory compression?

Windows 10/11 will automatically generate a notification whenever there is 10% or less available RAM remaining. It might even be 20%. I cannot recall the value (% of memory remaining) that triggers the notification.

To truly know what memory is being consumed you need to start by knowing what your actual available system memory is in kilobytes:

# Value of system available RAM in kilobytes (get-wmiobject -class "Win32_ComputerSystem").TotalPhysicalMemory

With that value you can confirm that it matches the value that Windows Task Manager reports for Memory on the Performance tab by converting it to GB:

Convert Byte to Gigabyte

Instant free online tool for byte to gigabyte conversion or vice versa. The byte [B] to gigabyte [GB] conversion table and conversion steps are also listed. Also, explore tools to convert byte or gigabyte to other data storage units or learn more about data storage conversions.

www.unitconverters.net

After you have established that value then you can study your memory consumption through any of multiple ways (a graphical representation of memory utilized is informative enough - in most cases):

1. Using PowerShell
For example,

How do I find the CPU and RAM usage using PowerShell?

I am trying to get PowerShell to give me the RAM and CPU usage, but I can't figure out what WMI class to use. My computer has two processors, so it would be useful to have the information for both of

stackoverflow.com

How do I get total physical memory size using PowerShell without WMI?

I'm trying to get the physical memory size using PowerShell, but without using get-wmiobject. I have been using the following PS cmdlet to get the physical memory size, but the value changes with ...

stackoverflow.com

2. Using any of the widely-used system monitoring utilities
- Process Hacker
- Process Explorer
- System Explorer
- System Informer
- Windows Task Manager
- Windows Performance Monitor

 

[bazang]

ESET does not have highly optimized memory usage that is better than all other security software. It just uses methods to hide the actual total memory consumed.

This is accomplished by loading large amounts of data into the drivers.

 

[Miravi]

This is the latest ESET Smart Security Premium running. I have 32 GB of memory with fairly nice hardware, so it's not a big concern for my setup.

View attachment 287101

Here's a more detailed overview in Process Explorer:

 

[Marko :)]

And now... the truth!

All antivirus software uses A LOT of RAM. Some might appear to use less than the others, but that's just lie because the rest of usage is hidden in the page file which isn't simply visible in Task Manager.

RAM usage shouldn't concern anyone because we're not in the 90s anymore. Chances are we all have way more RAM than we actually need. "But what about Windows, why does it use so much RAM?" Windows doesn't use that much RAM as it claims. It just reserves it in case the OS will need additional memory for functioning. If you come close to using your entire RAM, Windows will automatically discard the RAM it's been reserving and give it away to the applications that need it. Ever since Windows 10, Windows has awesome RAM management and is very efficient.

And remember: unused RAM is wasted money!

 

[Vitali Ortzi]

This is accomplished by loading large amounts of data into the drivers.

Maybe that's why I couldn't even use eset on a 2 ram machine it showed 20mb of usage in task manager (majority hidden )
meanwhile the system was choking hard
Only security software on that machine currently is comodo

 

[Vitali Ortzi]

And now... the truth!

All antivirus software uses A LOT of RAM. Some might appear to use less than the others, but that's just lie because the rest of usage is hidden in the page file which isn't simply visible in Task Manager.

RAM usage shouldn't concern anyone because we're not in the 90s anymore. Chances are we all have way more RAM than we actually need. "But what about Windows, why does it use so much RAM?" Windows doesn't use that much RAM as it claims. It just reserves it in case the OS will need additional memory for functioning. If you come close to using your entire RAM, Windows will automatically discard the RAM it's been reserving and give it away to the applications that need it. Ever since Windows 10, Windows has awesome RAM management and is very efficient.

And remember: unused RAM is wasted money!

Technically it can run with a few megabytes of actual ram and just use paging, compression etc for the rest of windows 11
But the minimum requirements of windows 11 are excessive because they want you to have good performance , security
So there is a ram limit to having a good experience on windows (technically you can disable so many stuff even ui elements like dwm and get a lower ram machine to a comfortable spot , disable mitigations to increase performance on old cpus but that's not ideal and not the experience Microsoft wants you to have )

 

[bazang]

Here's a more detailed overview in Process Explorer:

View attachment 287131

For ESET, any values reported in utilities that can report memory are not accurate.

ESET hides its actual memory usage.

ESET is not the only one that does it; most all of them use various methods to make their RAM utilization to be lower than it actually is.

RAM utilization only matters for a system with low available RAM and, in particular, a HDD page file.

One can easily exceed available RAM on a high RAM count system with multiple virtual machines running (e.g. 4 or more VMs running simultaneously) or massive video file editing. The system will constantly be above 80% usage of the available RAM.

 

[Apoca·lypse]

Only Edge play web video

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Bitdefender(BDTS)

Based on previous comments, I'm not sure of the actual memory usage of Bitdefender and my other computer installed ESET(ESSP) , but it is now running very smoothly.