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Given up (temporarily) on Sophos for Mac

JohnW

For reasons that I won't go into, I have been using Sophos on Macintosh 10.7 Lion for rather longer than most people, and have had no problems. Following the latest update, I found that I had frequent frequent crashes with fairly banal applications used one at a time, Safari, Microsoft Office Outlook, Console, Terminal, with frozen screen, no access to menus, and the only way of shutting down being to hold down the power button.  I noticed, when Activity Monitor was working, that Sophos was typically using  around 78% of the CPU for things like updating, then failing to return the memory, resulting in up to 3.4GB of my total 4GB being in the blue "Inactive" area (as opposed to "Free").  Deleting Sophos resolved the difficulties, and current memory use is typically half of the total. I tried reinstalling, and the first crash came within minutes.  I like Sophos, and have a "paid for" version running on my Windows virtual machine, but will not be using it on the Mac side until I have evaluated a future update.

    Pity! 

:1003703


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    Hmm... this definitely sounds like it's likely an Apple issue, but I'll keep my eye on it too.  The issue being related to large file access volume would explain some of the issues being described on here recently.  Possibly this is an issue related to available filehandles?  SAV is friendly and gives them back right away, and it doesn't grab too many at a time, but if Apple's taking a little while to make them available to the rest of the OS after they've been released, Lion could quickly reach its filehandle limit, which would in turn cause an issue such as this (open files still work, anything depending on new open files, including caching and other OS-related functions, would freeze).

    If you're up for a bit of digging, checking your "launchctl limit maxfiles" value and lsof results in terminal.app when you suspect a freeze is coming should tell you if you are using up your file handles.  In launchctl, the first column is the soft limit, and the second is the hard limit, per-process.  Leaving off maxfiles in the command will show you the other limits set by launchctl.  ulimit -a and sysctl -a can also provide interesting information.

    Usually this will leave a logfile though, so we may have to search elsewhere for the issue.

    :1004065
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  • 0

    Hmm... this definitely sounds like it's likely an Apple issue, but I'll keep my eye on it too.  The issue being related to large file access volume would explain some of the issues being described on here recently.  Possibly this is an issue related to available filehandles?  SAV is friendly and gives them back right away, and it doesn't grab too many at a time, but if Apple's taking a little while to make them available to the rest of the OS after they've been released, Lion could quickly reach its filehandle limit, which would in turn cause an issue such as this (open files still work, anything depending on new open files, including caching and other OS-related functions, would freeze).

    If you're up for a bit of digging, checking your "launchctl limit maxfiles" value and lsof results in terminal.app when you suspect a freeze is coming should tell you if you are using up your file handles.  In launchctl, the first column is the soft limit, and the second is the hard limit, per-process.  Leaving off maxfiles in the command will show you the other limits set by launchctl.  ulimit -a and sysctl -a can also provide interesting information.

    Usually this will leave a logfile though, so we may have to search elsewhere for the issue.

    :1004065
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