Why does it stop scanning for extended periods?

I have a lot of files, and that's only just over 1.5 million on 3 TB of storage space (much less than 5 million!).  I haven't noticed any pauses, or even any sluggishness.  What Mac are you using?  If you only have two cores that may slow things down.  I'm running EIGHT BOINC processes at around 98% each with my Quad Core i7, and the SophosAVAgent Process is hovering around 40-56% (That actually slows down my 8 BOINC processes to around 87%).

I would think that the sluggish feel may be due to an I/O bottle neck or just simply having only 2 cores to work with.  The I/O bottle neck could be the cause of the "Items Remaining" counter to pause, are you using Swap memory (free memory down to ~10MB)?  If so, increase your RAM; that is still the easiest, most effective, and inexpensive way to improve performance, especially if you don't have enough.  4GB for Snow Leopard seems to be the norm now.  I have 16GB and Mac OS X has no problem using all of it.  The more you have, the more it will use to increase performance!

Tom

Ok, I see your complaint is valid, about the pauses.  My scan paused at 1,277,600 (exactly) items remaining.  The SophosAVAgent Process is running 4 threads for a total of 85.6% to 88.4% CPU load.  I suspect it is scanning within a large archive.  Nothing to worry about.  And now (update), the SophosAVAgent root Process is back to around 45% CPU usage and is scanning around 150 files per second.

Tom

The funny thing is, it's running 2 AVAgent processes, but combined I'm seeing only about 40% peak CPU (and usually no more than 20%), 

Maybe the long delays are when it's scanning a disk image file; I have a few of those. Can it see the individual files in disk images? 

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RobLewis wrote:

The funny thing is, it's running 2 AVAgent processes, but combined I'm seeing only about 40% peak CPU (and usually no more than 20%), 

Maybe the long delays are when it's scanning a disk image file; I have a few of those. Can it see the individual files in disk images? 

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The UI increments when each file has completed scanning.  Disk images, zip files, Java jar files, and other archives (such as sparsimage bundles used by Time Machine) are each considered a "file" and so the progress bar doesn't... progress when that "file" is being unpacked and the contents scanned.  I've already made a note to the UI team that there should be a change made to indicate archive contents are indeed still being scanned in these cases.  Right now the indication to watch for is whether the progress bar is still pulsing.  If this stops (no motion in the bar at all, not just a stall in forward motion), then scanning progress has also stopped.  Otherwise, it's just a really large file that requires a lot of unpacking and further attention.

Thanks for clarifying that. In my case, the progress bar continues to pulse even when it's apparently stalled (like right now: it's been stuck on one number for several minutes). 

2 UI comments: 

1. If the name of the current file was displayed in the progress window, I might not have thought there was anything wrong. Why not do it? 

2. For .dmg and other archives, how about something like this: a small "secondary" progress bar appears, maybe below the main one, and shows the progress with scanning within the archive. DiskWarrior does something kind of similar to this. 

Update: it's been scanning for about 60 hours now and is not quite half done with my 5 million files, for an average rate of about 11 files/second. 

It is still going in fits and starts. It will scan for a while with fairly rapid decrementing of the item counter, and then just stop for long periods. I don't believe I could possibly have enough large archive files on my disks to account for this (an excellent argument for making it display the name of the current file, IMO). 

And a question: if it crashes, or if I need to stop the scan for any reason, will it pick up where it left off, or will it start over from scratch? 

Oh, great. I just came back to the computer and there were two message windows up. The top one said the scan had not finished and gave me the option of continuing the scan or abandoning it. I told it not to quit. The next one said the scan couldn't be completed because of an error (no explanation). And the Sophos Anti-Virus window just says "This scan has never been completed" (thanks a lot), and "264 threats." There's a "Play" button, which I presume means to start scanning, and another button with something that looks kind of like a pencil on it, maybe "Edit", but why would I want to do that? 

What now, fellas? If I click "Play," does it start over at the beginning (no, thanks). 

On the whole, it appears that it's taken me 3 days of enduring a very sluggish system to determine that this program is basically unusable. I know, it's free. But I kind of feel like I've been led down the garden path. 

I'm having the same problem.  My scan has been stuck at the same number of items for about 12 hours.  A previous scan hung for days, before I had to reboot.  Together, all the processes whose name begins with Sophos (Anti-Virus, AntiVirus, etc.) are using less than 10% of one CPU.  The total memory of all these processes is less than 200 MBytes.  I'm running OS X Lion on an old MacBook with a Core 2 Duo and 4 GB RAM.

I agree that a file notification would help a lot.

I just downloaded and started to use the SOPHOS program. I first put it on and decided to stop scanning as I didn't want to slow my system down while working. When I hit "stop scan" it stopped and told me I had three threats that needed to be eliminated. Last night i put it on and it's still at the 1,324,306 files remaining. I do have video files on the computer and music so i don't kwow if it takes more time to scan those heavier files. 

I've been at 2,552,334 items for about 18 hours. No threats so far, but "issues detected".

So... is there a specific FAQ or something that spell out other useres questions? I've looked but I can't find asnswers to:

• If I quit, will it resume scanning from where it left off, or start all over?
• Is there a way to see if Sophos hang is a crash or just some sort of Mystery File?
• Is there a txt file somewhere that gives any indication of what its doing Right Now?
• How long do you guys (users) wait before giving up?

-- Jim