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Given up (temporarily) on Sophos for Mac

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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  • Andrew,

    Yes. I have tried both and it still locks up lion. Apple so far don't know why my log etc data has been sent higher up the food chain in applecare. The weird thing is and this is what got apple's attention is there is no log data. It is like time just stops, no crash no panic just the computer freezes. Interestingly if I'm playing a song via itunes this continues to play. But the bottom line is that TM on an external via a USB connection no like Sophos. 

    See also: http://forums.macrumors.com/archive/index.php/.../t-1204593.html

    :1004061
  • 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
  • Andrew,

    I keep gettng this in my logs

    com.apple.SecurityServer: Failed to authorize right 'com.sophos.cleanup' by client '/Library/Sophos Anti-Virus/SophosAntiVirus.app' [78] for authorization created by '/Applications/Sophos Anti-Virus.app' [1611]

    My guess is it is a system resource issue and the computer is maxing out during backup hence the freeze. I heard back from Apple after looking at my logs they have concluded it is a Sophos issue. However they won't tell me how the reached this conclusion. 

    :1004085
  • Hello all,

    I just wanted to add a "me too" to the memory usage thing.  I have been noticing all my memory was inactive (on a maching with 6 Gig) after running and closing a bunch of programs.  I un-installed Sophos this morning and that seems to be the culprit.  Running all my programs and only using 1/2 of my memory.  I hope a fix is coming soon!

    John

    :1004107
  • Me again,

    I can confirm this bug too.  If Sophos is enabled and scanning a Time Machine disk and the boot disk at the same time, it will hang up the system.  Adding the Backups.db to the exclusion list will "fix" the problem.

    John

    :1004109
  • Any update on this?  I had to unistall Sophos too as it kept locking up my Mac (OS Lion).

    :1004371
  • Just throwing in a "me too" as I have been fighting this issue for ~3 mnths now.  I have 3 systems running Lion and all three experience the issue when Sophos AV is installed.  It should be noted that each is on different hardware ('09 Mini, '10 MBP, '11 MBA) with two being upgrades and the Air being a clean Apple install.  They are used for differing purposes and each by different people, except the Mini is a HTPC.  

    The common factor is always Sophos AV.  I have removed and reinstalled for 10.7, 10.7.1, and 10.7.2 with the issue recurring every time I reinstall Sophos AV.  I think this is a great product, but there are some issues that need to be resolved on either the Apple or Sophos side.

    Hopefully this will be corrected and I can install Sophos AV and get a little peace of mind.  

    -Whit

    :1004605
  • Sorry; forgot to update this thread.  As noted in another thread, this issue has been verified and duplicated internally, and there is a fix coming in the next major point release, sometime next year.  Until then, the short term fix for those who experience this issue is to exclude Time Machine from regular scans.

    :1004619
  • Hello all,

        I just did the work around mentioned but I wanted to remind folks that you need to exclude the Mobile Backups hidden partition backup directory on Laptops to keep this issue from happening on the off-line Time Machine backups.

    John

    :1004627
  • Good catch; this is indeed the case.

    :1004629