memory hog

Killing and restarting the AV via launchd wouldn't work, as the AV is already self-healing (to protect against malware attempting to kill it off).  However, Intercheck should idle at around 30MB real mem, sguimenu should idle at around 2.3MB, SophosAntiVirus should idle at around 1MB, SophosAutoUpdate should idle at around 800kb, and SophosUIServer should idle at around 90MB.  SophosAVAgent should idle at around 1.3MB, and should spawn another SophosAVAgent suring a scan, that will use up CPU time and increasing real memory.  The process that should eat up more memory and CPU time during an on-access scan is Intercheck.

Out of curiosity, do you use Google Chrome as your web browser?

Those memory numbers would be fantastic.

Most often I use Safari, sometimes Firefox, and lately Opera.  Not all at once either. Safari started to become unusable, and I was quitting that frequently. No Chrome on this machine. 

Just for fun, I restarted Sophos and set it for on-access scanning. For a disk scan, I'm checking archives, but not for on-access.

Intercheck shows 85 mb, third on the list after the kernel and Safari.  Sophos UI server is around 6 mb, and Sophos AV is 13 mb. 

So now I have plenty of memory. 

I should have mentioned that I'm running 10.5.8. Mostly I connect to it via VNC and play music all day, occasionally using whichever browser I've got up for pages that won't display with adblock, flashblock and noscript on my desktop. 

Barry

It occurs to me that I'm not clear on what Sophos components are running. 

The problem seems to occur with "Sophos Anti-Virus"  -- which is a distinct process from "SophosAntiVirus". 

The former seems to be creeping up. The other pieces Agile listed like "Intercheck" seem stable. I'm not sure that "Sophos Anti-Virus" needs to stay open, but in order to test for memory use/leaks, I'm automatically checking once a day. If memory use keeps growing, I'll posts the figures. If it stays stable for a few weeks, I'll post something on that. 

Thanks for this information! The "Sophos Anti-Virus" process can indeed be closed; I'll let the dev team know there's a possible leak in there, as the main application should be using almost no resources when idle (all it does is set off the other ones on their tasks).

I ran ps v PID for six days running at 10:45 each day. You can see how an increasing amount of memory is being used.  The machine was little used during these days. The other Sophos processes were all stable. 

So now I'll close the program and know in the future not to leave this running. 

Here's a cut and paste of the output:

The date and time appears on first line of every two

The putput of 'ps' on the second.

The cols are PID STATUS  TIME SL RE  PAGEIN VSZ  RSS LIM  TSIZ %CPU %MEMORY COMMAND

--Sat Jul  2 10:45:00 EDT 2011  

615 S         7:37.88   0   0      0   242576  73396    -        0   0.4  3.5 Sophos Anti-Virus

---Sun Jul  3 10:45:01 EDT 2011  

615 S     15:25.25   0   0      0   295384 125072     -        0   0.0  6.0 Sophos Anti-Virus

---Mon Jul  4 10:45:01 EDT 2011  

615 S     25:51.48   0   0      0   347164 175756     -        0   0.0  8.4 Sophos Anti-Virus

---Tue Jul  5 10:45:01 EDT 2011  

615 S      38:58.82   0   0      0   402012 228408     -        0   1.4 10.9 Sophos Anti-Virus

---Wed Jul  6 10:45:01 EDT 2011  

615 S     54:39.48   0   0      0   453280 279156     -        0   0.1 13.3 Sophos Anti-Virus

---Thu Jul  7 10:45:01 EDT 2011 

 615 S      73:00.46   0   0      0   504552 329844     -        0   0.0 15.7 Sophos Anti-Virus

Hi Barry,

I've logged a defect to track this leak (DEF72694).

Thank you for all your help!

Alex

I too may be having this under Lion (10.7.2) but have not done as detailed research. Currently I have Sophos scanning off but not uninstalled. How can we find out when this is either fixed or rejected?

after many attempts - i removed sophos for the 2nd and final time.  Computers are all back to normal.  Too bad - and i appreciate the free offer; but not at the expense of performance.  Thanks anyway!

My numbers are similar to what should be expected as reported above by the dev. on my iMac 24".  Just checked Activity Monitor and all seems fine.  Had the program on for a bit less than a week.  The MenuBar icon is on, I keep the the App in the Dock off.  Running that way, it picked up an issue in something I dl'd, quarentined it, and then dealt with.  The program works, as far as I can tell.

Thanks.