[solved] Number Of Signatures Issue

Well, I'm not really sure if it is a real issue or not but here's the info:

Monday morning (Eastern Standard Time): Virus Signatures: 6571473, Engine Version: 7.33004

The next update, after I returned from work, update which included the fix for the Firefox Antiphishing toolbar ...

Monday afternoon (Eastern Standard Time): Virus Signatures: 6188380, Engine Version: 7.33012

Now it's Thursday afternoon (Eastern Standard Time) and the numbers say: Virus Signatures: 6193803, Engine Version: 7.33076

All updates performed normally from Monday till today, there were no issues whatsoever. What drew my attention to this was a post on the French forum where someone else has the same problem.

What happened with the number of signatures on Monday? Why did it drop by 40,000 so suddenly?

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Comments

AndreiRC

Correction: the drop in signatures was 400,000, not 40,000. My mistake.

sm1

All antivirus companies optimize their signature database to improve performance. Some viruses will have common characteristics and so a single signature will detect all those viruses instead of releasing a separate signature for each virus. Signatures have to be loaded in memory and it makes sense to keep the signature database size to minimum. All antivirus companies will detect more threats than the number specified in virus signatures.

AndreiRC

Hmm ... didn't think about that, but it sounds like a logical approach to me. That would probably explain what happened then.

Alright, thanks for the feedback.

alexcrist

Yes, there were actually some optimizations made which led to removal of a few hundred thousands of redundant signatures. It wasn't exactly what sm1 described, but it's close enough.

Cris.

AndreiRC

Cheers for the clarification, Cris.

alexcrist

I'm glad to be of help.

Cris.

== CLOSED ==

== Issue solved ==