Endpoint Protection

I assume they are set to low priorty in terms of client resource?

Just testing and my test machine has been running this scan for 4 hours now - decent spec laptop, 80 GB hard drive - not too many programs, local files installed..

Any idea how long scheduled scans take to run in SEP?  Used to be around 60 mins on SAV (not that I am comparing, just trying to get a benchmark what is 'normal'').

Thanks chaps.

Hello  Davinci_uk
As you well know your CPU and RAM is important for take a time. i have 2 scheduled scans in a week. one of them take 2 hours or more. another take 2 hours. What is your computer configuration?
Thanks.

How long is a piece of string....?

There are so many variables it's untrue - we have around 1000 clients, the fastest can take under an hour, and the slowest around 48 hours.

Process priority is configurable.

Things I find slow a scan down:

• Physical number of files on a drive (obviously)
• How full the drive is
• How fragmented the drive is
• How many Zips, Cabs, other compressed files there are on the drive
• Speed of the drive
• Other running processes (particularly ones that compete for drive access)

In my experience, 4 hours isn't too unusual as a general time, but if it happened on my machine I'd wonder what was going on, since mine normally takes about 1.5 hours.

It depends , ON the  HD space , the resources ( RAM and CPU)  the number of files and the kind of files that it is scanning.

i have a 160 GB HD and it takes about 2.5 hrs to compete the scan

All of the above - varies with:
Processer abilities, and how busy is it doing other things.
How are priorities set?
Drive size, type and speed. How is the drive configured? BIOS settings?
Is the drive badly fragmented or not?
File types - more EXEs and DLLs, or mostly text files?
Size of files.
How do you have SAV/SEP configured? All files, or specific types? Any exclusions?
If using SMS, etc.  -it places some humungous files in the cache area that can literally take several minutes each to scan.
Zipped and multi-zipped files slow things down.
Here, I've seen from 30 minutes to several hours - all on similar machine types.........
(most fall into the 45 minutes to an hour range, but 2+ isn't uncommon either)
So I like the "how long is a piece of string" remark...... there will be as many scan lengths as there are machines and people combinations, and it can and will vary based on anything that a computer can contain or be used for.

 I was under the impression that SEP is running with low priority when scanning to not consume to much resources on the computer and that is why it takes longer to run

Of course you dont know my spec.

I am trying to compare agaisnt SAV, that was quicker.

Just wodnered thats ll.

SAV probably wasn't scanning as thoroughly as SEP is, which would probably account for the difference.

According to the SEP agent a full scan should take about 30-120 minutes. I am wondering how Symantec came up with this spec since it must vary a lot.

Its probably just an average. 30-120 minutes would be what I typically see on a typical office machine.

It would be interesting to get some stats on how long a scan takes for different users.

If you have done some measurements please share your knowledge