Ok, here is the story. My team and I had a very bad day yesterday. We were not able to work on our project because Domino Designer decided to take more than an hour for the build process. I tried to find out, what was wrong. My other team members in the head office did not reported this issue. So I had a weird network issue in mind bacause the issue occurred on all machines in the brnch office but was not able to find out any hint, what caused Designer to obviously wait for some action to complete when building the project. Even changing the code in a Java class was not possible. Each keyboard action took some seconds up to minutes to reflect the changes.
We are all working on local replicas of the files. And, it worked the day before … So WE did not change anything on the machine. Aside from this, we, the developers do not have proper rights to change ANYTHING on the machine. The is done by our friends, THE ADMINS.
Today, I saw a message when starting my computer that the Sophos AV has been successfully updated some files. Never seen that before … I decided to take also AV in consideration and looked into the settings. And there it was. “SCAN ALL FILES” and “SCAN IN ALL DIRS”. Exclusions? Well …. NO. I managed to tweak the settings to exclude the Notes dir. And, what do you think? Right, everything now works at full speed again.
Shall I say “Thank you, admins” ?
If we encounter anything that looks like delay or slow performance, the AV software settings is the FIRST place we look for culprits! Couple of years experience with AV software does that to you.
Domino admins feel your pain 😉 I had exact the same problem with my Notes client and some VM’s after a Sophos update a few days ago. My laptop started to get slower and slower so I checked the settings and of course all my previously entered exclusions had been removed.
Therefore I would say “thank you, AV admins”
Some AV software (*cough* McAfee *cough*) has a plugin that installs itself by adding a .dll in the notes.ini as “EXTMGR_ADDINS=NCExtMgr”. This has the effect of scanning all network traffic.
Why? Any virus in the form of an executable would have to be dumped to the disk to execute, and then the on-demand portion of the AV would nail it. That is of course if you have jelly for brains and try and launch it in the first place. All the extra scanning does is slow your traffic down to a crawl.
And woe betide you if you have an AV that insists on scanning all files. Scan a locally encrypted 1gig mail file? By all means. Lets turn the speed of this high performance developer specced machine into a tub of molasses.
Sorry, I’ll get down off my soapbox now.
Just remember to let the Admins know about what caused the slow down, so they can report it to the AV company.
Btw, MS sysinternal tools can be handy to find out what is going on in the background in these instances.
Allways look at the bright side of life.
Be nice to admins.
If your admins would know what they are doing, you won’t be able to change AV settings as a user.
It not a good idea to exclude an area an user has read/write access to from AV scanning.
The admins should really report this to the Sophos team since it’s clearly a bug.
@Pablo: I don’t think, it is a bug. Sophos is working as designed. It scans all files. And when you does not have file/dir exclusion in place, it will scann ALL files. This is clearly a problem on our site. Have to talk too my admin.