Hi!
I use COMODO Firewall along with AVAST and I’m wondering if CIS AV module reached a decent performance yet. Last time I checked (december or november maybe, 2008) it was at least 2,5 slower than AVG Free or AVAST plus it affected low-level HDD operations such as defragmentic or free space calculation. Is it fixed now? Be honest, please. I might wait for 4.0 as well.
P.S. Any release date predictions or at least new GUI screenshots of v4.0?
Hello.
COMODO’s AV detection rate is improving daily, but it produces a lot of false positives and there are no official tests on it’s detection rate. (by official I mean Virus Bulletin, AV Comparatives and such)
+1 on Commodus
You can also follow the updates of new signatures here:
I think Bucic asked about something else-scanning speed, Am I correct? I used to have Avast and in my opinion CAVS ver 3.5 was euqual or even faster than Avast!, but it is just my point of wiev. Generally CAVS is not super fast (at least on my PC 
) but the new versions are difinatelly faster than the old ones. Do I make any sense? (:SHY)
I guess you’re right, Commodus fooled me into the signature talking. (:AGY)
As for on-access scanning speed I’m very happy and I notice that the CIS processes takes quite little CPU time, at least on my machine last time I checked.
On-demand scanning speed is better now than before, as far as I know.
Yep, I was not asking about detection rate. The main concern is low-end HDD operations slowdown. Regular AV slows down system only during scanning of something while COMODO AV slows down every HDD operation all the time. I have quite simple test for this but I don’t feel like uninstalling Avast, installing CIS and then do a reverse just to check something which was not officialy reported as fixed.
The test is simple - let WinDirStat scan space of all of your drives/partitions and check the time. Believe me you don’t need a stopwatch to notice the difference if this hasn’t been fixed.
At the same time COMODO CIS proved that low CPU/RAM utilization does not guarantee a top notch performance. Use my CPU, use my RAM, but stay away from my HDD (as much as possible) as todays HDDs are INSULT to the word technology and major bottleneck of any desktop system.
It seems I wasn’t reading carefuly :-[ When I read performance I though it’s about detection. As for speed - CAV is very quick. It seems it has some problems wit mp3’s and archives, but overall it’s speed is great. Don’t know if the slow defragmeting issue has been fixed though :-\
Thanks for your answers but I’ll wait for CIS 4.0 unless the FIX is officially confirmed.
This is my point exactly. There is a big problem in how CIS is utilizing the disk, it is actually just abusing it for the sake of saving ram and cpu… If your HDD gets ■■■■■■■, than who cares about cpu and ram or even about your whole pc?..
Hmm interesting.
Hoping for some DEV input about this… :-\
This might be the reason for CIS 3.9 will use the BOclean scanner as memmory scanner instead. 
“BO Clean Memory Scanner (Totally Re-Written Memory Scanner that is very light), It will use BOClean signatures and technology and will work with CAV signatures.”
Maby waiting for 3.9 is a wise choice after all =).
@DaRtH VaDeR.:
If you are close to COMODO team then make use of it
@Monkey_Boy=):
Memory scanner scans memory, doesn’t it?
Indeed.
So you are basically saying that some kind of constant HDD usage is the tradeoff for having low CPU/RAM utilization in CIS? I’m really not good at these things, so could you please elaborate a little on what this means in practice. More HDD wear and tear? You mentioned “abuse”, VaDeR. What about it? ???
Just curious…
I don’t have any problems with the AV: Scans run very fastly and defragmenting with Defraggler is going on without noticeable delays.
Yes, It does. I see this is about file scanning, Iam totally off today, I have fever, Í just stop here before I start talking about monkeys! ;D BOClean is a different approach it targets active memmory stuff instead of harddrive I can see that now… =)
Or am I still wrong? Trying to learn a thing or two here =)
What you could do since you seems to know how to test those read write operations is that you deactivate Avast and install latest CIS with Antivirus, and test this… you won’t have to uninstall and reinstall anything that way, If CIS is still preforming badly you might as well just deactivate CIS antivirus real time monitor thing, and reactivate Avast and wait for next CIS to test again, also you will have CAVS as an ondemand thing that way… (:KWL) (:KWL)
But since DaRtH VaDeR confirms this I bet CIS still is using this “behaviour”.
I am close to Comodo in the sense I love their products and their long term goals, and I love their interaction with people like here on the forums. Other than this I am just a regular forum member like you!
Well, what I am saying is that on certain hardware setup on certain pc configurations, the scanning engine of CAVS utilizes the hard disk in such a manner that it puts a heavy load on the overall system performance during “active” scanning… This is visible in different ways, you can notice very slow responding or no response at all, you hear the hard drive making excessive sounds, you see slow scanning progress, you just notice that the hard drive is having a hard time during the active scanning of you hard drive by cavs… Eventually this can have severe consequences if we talk about the long term life cycle of a hard drive… The relation between RAM, HDD usage and CPU load means in this case that there has been chosen to have a small impact on cpu and RAM during a cavs scan, and put the necessary force needed for a scan on to the hard drive, rather to choose for a compromise between cpu load and disk load, this means in my eyes a medium load for the cpu and a medium load for the disk… The best will be of course if the developers manged to create a scanning engine that has a light impact on both CPU, RAM and HDD, that will be very very awsome.
Note: I am no computer expert or developer at the moment, it could be that my views on this issue are wrong, in that case a developer of cavs could shed more bright light on this…
About high HDD load being a tradoff for low cpu/RAM utilization - I don’t wan’t to be rude but it shouldn’t be our concern. HDD load I remember is just unacceptable. COMODO should review priorities here. IMO people wouldn’t mind if CIS took 50MB of RAM if only they could get NOD32-like HDD performance.
I don’t wan’t to go OT but you’d all be surprised how many apps known as demanding (including MS oses) doesn’t use available RAM before they give a beating to the PC bottleneck which is HDD. Pisses me off…
IF I go for CIS now I’ll perform no AV vs Avast vs CIS simple test using WindirStat.
just to be fair, it would be good to run comparison like for like configuration testing for performance before we jump into conclusion. CIS is very light on resources, so lets get the real facts by tests…
Melih
I think it’s a fair set of tests. Use it so I can switch back to COMODO AV
WinDirStat tests
Every test (7 total) done after reebot.
AVAST
1:23
1:41
1:31
NO AV (Avast clean uninstall)
1:26
1:34
1:23
COMODO CIS
15 minutes to get to 90% progress
No comments needed. Same with defragging (PerfectDisk) and other heavy disk operations (like launching OpenOffice.org).
Important notice - during a WinDirStat test CIS detected a malware and displayed a window. WinDirStat activity was stopped until I chose an action.
Computer virtualy unusable during WinDirStat tests with CIS. To create an empty folder is a chore taking more than 10 seconds. Same during regular manual CIS scan. It seems that CIS performs scanning during WinDirStat data collecting.
OT - after using Avast for months and after few scans performed yesterday and today with Spybot S&D AND COMODO’s “malware scanner” (during installation of CFP) COMODO CIS has detected 2 new threats.
OT [EDIT] - both threats are false positives (SUPER from erightsoft)! https://forums.comodo.com/empty-t34475.0.html I use the latest CIS version with updated virus definitions. Not nice…
Test system specification
Win XP SP3 32-bit (both “mature” and “young”)
C2D E7200 2.53GHz @ ~ 3.5GHz
2GB DDR2-800 RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT 512 MB (Gigabyte GV-NX96T512HP)
ASUSTeK P5E-VM HDMI Rev 1.00G
Barracuda® ES ST3250620NS 7200RPM 16-MBcache NCQ AHCI
Few months ago I had it working in SATA-IDE mode with similar results.
Creative Audigy Platinum (SB0090)
BenQ FP93GX+ 1280x1024
CIS AV settings
RT scannig:
Enabled
Scan memory on start
Show alerts
Heuristics level Low
Do not… larger than 20 MB
Stop scanning… 60s
Keep alert… 666s
Manual scanning:
all options checked
heuristics low
do not… 20MB
Sched scanning:
Same as manual except
scan memory on start
scan archives
disabled
Exclusions:
Default
.
Now that I think about it, when the real-time scanner of CIS is enabled, I see my HDD light flash a lot more than when it is disabled. Even more than when I used Avast!..
But you may be talking about manual scans…BTW, I almost never run them.
Scheduled scans would give similar results, Jeremy. I have my (CIS) system set to scheduled scan every Sunday at Midnight (I believe this is default). I usually forget all about it until the scan takes place. This is because the system slows down and HDD activity increases dramatically when the scan is taking place. I can still function, albeit slower.