scan freezes up

never mind it just needed a long time to work

This is due to scanning inside archives (the bar doesn't progress, but it still "throbs").

Past answers don't help me:

1. Scan freezes after a short time, stays frozen for more than 12 hours.

2. Tried to stop scan, quit Sophos, even deleted program, but the scan shield keeps circling and it won't start a new scan.

3. Reinstalled, but can't break into thew frozen state of the shield.

I've discovered a similar issue with SAV for Mac HE 9.0.1;

After scanning for 6 days the progress display stopped updating at around 4.8 million items remaining (about half way) -- I left it to run for another day before trying to stop it.  Then I left it another 3 hours before I used Activity Monitor to kill off all the sophos processes (which automatically respawn) -- this did the trick and stopped the scan, and brought performance back to normal on my computer (during the last day or two, disk access was way up (seemed more from swap than from the actual file scans).

The largest archive I had was 8GB, and I killed the scan when it appeared to be attempting to go through some smaller files.

Interestingly, the last thing that happened before the GUI closed down was that the Items Remaining count suddenly changed from 4.8 million down to some smaller number (like 4.3 million) immediately before the program quit.  It really looked like some other process was blocking data updates to the gui, but the scan was continuing (in a laboured manner) in the background.

Computer: iMac 2009, 8GB RAM

Scan info:

Sophos Anti-Virus
Product version: 9.0.1
Threat detection engine version: 3.45.0
Threat data version: 4.91
Release date: 10 July 2013
Detects 5364304 threats

Scan name: "Scan Local Drives"
Scan items:
Configuration:
        Scan inside archives and compressed files: Yes
        Automatically clean up threats: No
        Action on infected files: Report only
        Live Protection enabled: Yes

Scan started at 2013-08-22 23:07:44 -0700
...

Scan cancelled at 2013-08-29 19:29:46 -0700

Checking the log, it was scanning new small files (slowly) right up to the end.  Seemed to be the Quarantine Manager that was having difficulty, but that's just a guess.

Having similar problems with the scan stopping with some 2million+ items still to scan (has been showing the same point for approx 18 hours now).

Any idea what is going on?  

Cheers

Kreej

Hi,

It may be that that the scan has actually completed in the background but the progress bar has just stuck (which I have seen). Have a look at the scan log.  

If you are running "Scan This Mac" rather than a custom scan then select "View scan log" from the "Scan" menu.

If you are running a custom scan then click on the scan to highlight it, then select "View scan log" from the cog menu at the bottom of the Custom Scans list.

In either case, if the scan has completed the log will show "Scan completed" and a summary.

If indeed the scan has not actually completed then I would quit the app and start again.

Also check the Sophos shield icon in the menubar at the top.  If there is a rotating clock hand in it then some process has stuck and I would reboot as well in that case.

Anyway that has been my experience with the issue.

Hope that may help.