Is memory usage on your Antivirus software high?

I did a full day session recently with the Brisbane SMB IT Professionals group which was a lot of fun. During that day, Radek Tkaczyk who works for VMVault a virtualisation hosting specialist company, showed me something very interesting.  He has a customer (quite a few of them actually) that runs both a hosted SBS 2003 server and a hosted Terminal Server on their systems. Radek uses VMWare to host his systems and has some monitoring on each of them that I found very interesting.  The graphs below show a customers systems when they switched from Symantec’s SBS Antivirus solution over to Trend Micro Worry-Free Business Security 6.0 5.1.  Have a very close look and you will see the massive drop in RAM, CPU and Disk utilisation that came on Jan 1 when they switch from Symantec to Trend.  The 2nd drop in the RAM utilisation came when Trend released a higher efficiency engine update to their software. 

Now I know we all have our favourite AV software and this post is bound to attract comments from all corners, but what I found was really illuminating is the hard facts.  I’ve not yet seen any independent information like this on any given AV vendors products over such a long period of time.  This type of information is what we need more and more, not just one off lab tests as many vendors use to justify their products, but solid, hard core, real world information.

Thanks Radek for the information and well done Trend Micro. 

UPDATE: Radek advised that I made an error in the version number of Trend and the fact that the CPU graph is only of the SBS server, not the Terminal Server.

RAM Usage

Disk Usage

CPU Usage

This is both CPU usage on the SBS server and on the Terminal Server (separate lines for each of them)