Bitdefender Services Slowing Down Network Disk Access
(Antivirus 2008 on windows xp, service pack 3)
The symptom: access to a network drive will sometimes become sluggish. Specifically, navigating the folders of the network drive through windows Explorer will take several seconds (up to 10 or so) when changing directories, and an .mp3 file on the network drive (being played through Windows Media Player) will stutter horribly, sometimes stalling completely for almost a minute.
After hours of testing, I narrowed the problem down to the two BitDefender services called "BitDefender Communicator" and "BitDefender Desktop Update Service". The BitDefender Antivirus 2008 application itself does not need to be running - these two services alone seem to cause the issue. I don't mean to imply these services are necessarily doing anything wrong - perhaps there is just some unfortunate interplay with another badly-configured system. In fact, a second computer on the network also runs BitDefender and can access the network drive without issues, so I suspect some configuration issue - but I don't know where to look.
I have tested this 4 or 5 times, as described below, with consistent results in every case.
I set BitDefender Antivirus to *not* run at Windows startup.
I set the 4 BitDefender services to Manual (using Control Panel / Administrative Tools / Component Services, in Windows Safe Mode).
Otherwise, those services would still run and the problem would manifest.
I rebooted the system.
With all the services disabled and with Antivirus not running, access to the network drive is great - browsing is about as fast as it could be, and .mp3 files from that drive play without the tiniest stutter.
As soon as I start the two services "BitDefender Communicator" and "BitDefender Desktop Update Service", within 10 seconds access to the network drive becomes sluggish and playing a new .mp3 from the drive will stutter horribly. There are brief periods of smooth access where the sluggishness disappears, but about 80% of the time access is terribly slow and the music stutters. If I don't start those services, access to the network drive remains fine. I don't need to start the other BitDefender services to see the problem - just those two seem to trigger the behavior.
My next step is to reinstall BitDefender, but I wonder if anyone else has had a similar experience or has some wisdom to share.
I did try turning off the "real time protection" feature, but that didn't help, which is not surprising since that does not disable the services that seem to be triggering the problem. I also tried adding the music folder on the shared drive to the "Exceptions" list (both on-access and on-demand).
Comments
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It looks like the problem is that NTI Shadow and BitDefender do not play well together. With just one of those running, there is no problem. With both running, there is terrible slowdown accessing the network drive.
I will try updating my NTI software.0
