Antivirus, Internet Security & Total Security Products Performance Benchmarking (2009)

Monday, June 8, 2009

Antivirus, Internet Security & Total Security Products Performance Benchmarking (2009)

Do you know that the Antivirus, Internet Security and/or Total Security product(s) installed in your computer could be consuming a lot of memory and CPU resources? They could also cause a lot of additional harddisk read/write activities. This could be the main reason why your PC become lagged.

Therefore, you should seriously consider the effect of the security solution to your computer performance, and select one that will have minimal impact, especially on memory and CPU consumption.

On 16 March 2009, PassMark Software has released the 4th edition of their 73-pages Antivirus, Internet Security and Total Security Performance Benchmarking Report.

The report was based on the performance benchmark testing results done on 47 Antivirus, Internet Security and Total Security products (free and non-free) from various vendors between July 2008 and October 2008.

Testing was performed on all products using seventeen performance metrics. These performance metrics are as follows:

Boot time
Total Scan speed
UI launch speed (initial and subsequent)
Memory utilization
HTTP download test
IE launch speed (initial and subsequent)
Installation Size
Installation Time
Registry Key Count
Copying, moving and deleting different types of common files
Installing third party applications
Downloading binary files from websites
File format conversion
File compression and decompression
File write, open and close

Note that no attempt was made to measure the effectiveness of threat detection.

Here are the overall results and ranking from the benchmarking tests.