The Symantec Data Loss Prevention (DLP) Discover scan remains stuck in the “loading policies” status with no evidence there is an issue.
The Discover ScanDetail log has little error and/or you do not observe other symptoms except time running accrual without reporting bytes/incidents and/or poor scan performance.
Note: If all policies are withdrawn except for a single keyword policy, the Discover scan completes as expected.
This can occur when the Discover server assigned the scan does not have enough resources to load the configured policies. Detection Technologies such as Indexed Document Matching (IDM) and Exact Data Matching (EDM) can require significant resources (several GB of RAM) for large data sets.
It also can occur if unable to load components such as indexed items.
See Determining requirements for both local and remote indexers for EDM
If additional resources are available on the system, more can be allocated to the FileReader process. In the Advanced Server settings for the Detection Server, increase the RAM available to file reader:
BoxMonitor.FileReaderMemory = -Xms 1024M -Xmx 4096M