I have Comodo free firewall installed (with Win7x86)
Every time I copy a file (e.g. from D:\Documents to H:\Backups) Comodo scans the file in some way. I can see this as as cmdagent.exe runs and uses a several percent cpu whilst the scan is running.
This is annoying in two respects (especially as I am often copying quite large files and the scans take a while to run).
Firstly, the PC is very noticeably slowed down, particularly if I am trying access the same physical drive for other purposes (e.g. head contention).
Secondly if the copy is to an external drive (that I want to disconnect after the copy), I cannot dismount the drive until the scan has completed.
Now I’ve looked all over the place for some way to disable such scanning (especially as I am not clear as to why a Firewall should scan files in such a way), but alas to no avail.
It’s not really scanning but gathering information about the file to save into local file database for file source tracking. You can see the stored information by enabling Comodo properties tab in file properties window using reg file from this post. Also it could be caused by VirusScope setting to monitor all applications, you should enable ‘Monitor contained applications only’.
It’s not the VirusScope setting, so maybe it is the file analysis. But it takes a long time (is it creating a hash?) and uses up to 20% CPU.
For example, when I create an image of my system partition (the image is currently about 9GB) the “process” takes over a minute after the file copy is completed (which is longer than the file copy itself).
The other thing is that it delays file deletions (until the process has completed), which can throw me at times - I’ve gone through the delete process, but the file is still shown as there until Comodo has done its thing.
In any event, given that I’m talking about file copies, couldn’t Comodo be more intelligent and use the analysis (which presumably it already has) of the source file?
Yes it calculates the file hash among other information about the file. To see what is being stored in the database use the enable_page.reg and right-click on file to select JSON: Dump information for the file. As for files not being deleted right away, it is a win7 issue as I have notice this even when CIS is not installed, and the System process still has an open handle to the file that is being deleted.