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Discussion Antivirus maxing out 8 threads

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Wait, they pay you 600x the price of the tool but say no? If you were in a trade rather than (witch)craft the cost of the tool would be a no brainer. You should be running hardware 2 years before it goes anywhere else in the organization for testing purposes. Its a small cost compared to bad organization wide f- up purchases.
 
MadRat said:
You should be running hardware 2 years before it goes anywhere else in the organization for testing purposes. Its a small cost compared to bad organization wide f- up purchases.
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I would love to be the tester of new hardware if they would only understand that this is a better way of doing things. The idiot is still buying 2021 hardware at 2025 prices and who knows what kind of backend commission he is making on each purchase.
 
Haswell can't run an Optane in it's cache configuration anyway, that was 7th gen or later. You CAN try to get ReadyBoost to enable, but, it's not going to make much of a difference. Swapping the SATA SSD for a faster one won't make much of a difference as you're still more interface bound, and the EVO 860 isn't a bad drive to begin with. You are likely I/O bound. While the cores are showing very high utilization, when they are stuck waiting for I/O, it's counted as being busy, so you have artificially high utilization.

Something else to consider: are you still running with all the security and vulnerability mitigations enabled? Those mitigations absolutely murder I/O throughput. The i5-12400 will be a massive I/O upgrade for you. Unless you are running the 5960X, it's an upgrade in every possible way for you, from I/O, to L3 cache, single core throughput, multi-core throughput, RAM throughput, etc. Even with the 5960X, you're still looking at better single core throughput and in 90+% of cases better multi-core performance. It also has very hew performance hurting mitigations as compared to Haswell.
 
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LightningZ71 said:
You are likely I/O bound. While the cores are showing very high utilization, when they are stuck waiting for I/O, it's counted as being busy, so you have artificially high utilization.
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I can easily do a custom scan of a folder with tons of various files on the SSD and then a RAMdrive and see how much improvement I get.
 
LightningZ71 said:
Something else to consider: are you still running with all the security and vulnerability mitigations enabled? Those mitigations absolutely murder I/O throughput. The i5-12400 will be a massive I/O upgrade for you. Unless you are running the 5960X, it's an upgrade in every possible way for you, from I/O, to L3 cache, single core throughput, multi-core throughput, RAM throughput, etc. Even with the 5960X, you're still looking at better single core throughput and in 90+% of cases better multi-core performance. It also has very hew performance hurting mitigations as compared to Haswell.
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I have considered all that already. But my current system's been with me more than 10 years and if I accept the lousy upgrade, I'll be stuck with 12 threads for the next 7 years at the minimum. I asked the COO to let me find something cheap that's better than the 12400 (with DDR4). I almost got a Lenovo Threadripper but it was used and the COO balked at buying used stuff and then obviously someone snatched the TR away. So still looking for the best workstation class system that isn't too expensive but has enough oomph to last me at least 8 years.
 
That lousy upgrade would probably double the throughout of your (presumably new NVME) SSD just for that AV solution. In fact I could risk a six-pack bet that it would triple+ performance during virus scans, since we're not talking about random 4K 1T performance. Don't underestimate the effect of improved CPU ST muscle on I/O bound operations.

The best cheap solution for the best cheap management is the 12600K though, that way they can definitely pretend they don't care for another 10 years.
 
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Well, the Eset Antivirus scan experiment was kinda disappointing. Scanned a 7.5GB folder of mostly documents, some archives and some EXEs (5000+ files). Scan completed in less than 5 seconds and CPU utilization didn't go above 30%. Next tried a 1.31GB ASP.NET folder (14000+ files) and this time, it briefly spiked to 96% or more but again the scan completed in less than 10 seconds. Not sure which file types are causing it to spike high.

Really making me wonder why the full PC scan is taking 30+ minutes with high CPU utilization when these tests show it can whizz through at least 1000 files a second. Maybe the stupid automatic Administrative scan is checking extra files that the normal scan doesn't do 🙁
 
LightningZ71 said:
Tom's of tiny files can do it
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Perfect answer!

1752936902991.png

This test confirmed that I'm CPU limited. The only thing RAMDRIVE did was max out the CPU cores completely at 100% while taking roughly the same time to scan the files while the SSD allowed the CPU to breathe a bit in between waiting for I/O.

RAMDRIVE Benchmark

1752937104769.png
 
Ramdrives tolerate very high queue depths at the expense of the processor time required to actually administer the drive. It inflates your processor usage quite a bit. The happy medium is an optane drive. It tolerates very high queue depths while having a higher transfer rate than the SATA SSD, but also has it's own controller chip, which takes a chunk of the load off of your processor.

Does your board have any m.2 slots or an open x4 PCIe slot.
 
LightningZ71 said:
Does your board have any m.2 slots or an open x4 PCIe slot.
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It has a whole X16 slot available and pretty sure at least one x4 slot too. I've never cloned from SATA to NVMe SSD so not sure if that will go smoothly. I will also need to spend my own money on an NVMe SSD and M.2 adapter thanks to that gorilla not co-operating. Easiest for me is to put in the Kingston DC600M.
 
You can get a 280GB 900p PCIe card. They're about $150ish if you look around. I think there are larger ones, but they get pricey quick.
 
Funny. I was scanning a USB flash drive using Windows Defender. The laptop fan got noisy because it was maxing out all eight threads and it said about 35 minutes remaining. I left it running. I come back after a while (pretty sure less than 30 minutes later) and it's silent. I thought the scanning was finished already. Login and see that it's still running with about 5 minutes remaining. The fan ramps up again. After about five minutes, it's still not done scanning and the time remaining is still 5 minutes or so. Fans have gone silent and it seems to be scanning at the same rate except two threads have gone pretty much quiet while the rest are being used variably for a total of ~36% total CPU usage.

Any explanation? What does the antivirus do in the first 5 minutes that takes all eight threads working hard?
 
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