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

Question

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.

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Agile · Accepted Answer

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. :1009152