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Temporary Disabling of Sophos on iMac so I can run Avid Pro Tools

Torchlight

How do I temporarily disable Sophos so that I can run applications like Avid Pro Tools?  Sophos must use enough RAM in the background to choke my Pro Tools application when the session is using heavy duty plugins.  I noticed this the other day when I was running a session with some fairly heavy plugins.  I would get the "increase CPU limit" message in Pro Tools.  I uninstalled Sophos and have no more issues.  My machine is an iMac (Core Duo) with 4GB of RAM.  It has never had problems running sessions with high track counts and heavy duty plugins.  I love the Sophos software but I can't use it if it's going to degrade my Pro Tools performance.  Is there a quick way to temporarily disable Sophos so that is not using any processing power while I am running ProTools?

Thanks.

:1009136


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    Yes; you just need to disable the on-access scanning.

    S menu -> Open Preferences... -> On-Access Scanning -> click the lock and authenticate -> stop scanning

    then repeat the process to re-enable.

    It's not really a RAM issue -- the issue is that Pro Tools is constantly writing cache files to the disk and reading them off -- and since they're always unique, Sophos hasn't cached them and so has to re-scan each one every time.  As you can guess, this results in a lot of overhead, especially when you're already pushing the envelope with your processing plugins.

    Personally, I upgraded to 8GB RAM (same iMac) because I was having major performance degradation running my entire workflow (with Sophos disabled).  With 8GB, I found that everything ran smoothly.  Not currently an issue for you, but you may want to consider the upgrade anyway.

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    Andrew,

    Thank you so much for this reply.  I guess that I will reinstall Sophos!!  I never wanted to uninstall it.

    I don't remember if I have the capability of expanding to 8 GB of RAM on my machine.  My stupid question is.....how can I tell if I can expand?  When I look at the "About this Mac" page on my computer I see 2 RAM slots, each one with 2 GB of DDR RAM.  If I only have 2 slots, can I replace the 2 GB RAM in each slot with 4 GB each?

    Last question:  When I select "Stop Scanning" does that in fact completely disable Sophos from doing ANYTHING?  When I run Pro Tools I want nothing taking resources away from its performance.  Sorry for the novice Mac questions.

    Jeff

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    To answer question 1: in About This Mac, click "More Info..." and then click the Memory tab.  Then click the Memory Upgrade Instructions link.

    The Memory tab tells you what sort of memory you can use; as you guessed, you'll have to replace your existing memory with 2 4GB sticks, which will top you out at 8GB (max allowed on your iMac I believe).

    Last answer: it doesn't stop Sophos from doing ANYTHING... however, the way resource management works on OS X, with the on-access scanning disabled, it should in no way hinder Pro Tools.  Disabling the daemons (Intercheck, auto-update, etc.) won't make any appreciable difference to what you're doing; the OS already optimizes that.  If you check your LaunchDaemons and LaunchServices settings, you'll see that there are many many other services running as well.  You could in theory disable all of them, but as the OS only loads them when it needs them, the net boost to your Pro Tools session is so insignificant as to be unnoticeable even by some profiling tools.

    One other thing you may want to do is temporarily turn off automatic updates as well -- if SAV starts doing a major software update in the middle of your Pro Tools session, this will definitely be noticeable.  I'd suggest turning off other services of this sort as well, including disabling the Apple Dashboard (or at least closing all dashboard widgets in dashboard view so they aren't running in the background).

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    Thanks again Andrew for all this useful information.

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    What model7year of iMac are you running?

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