Bitdefender Slows Startup

Huji

Recently (past two-three months), my system restart much slower than before. In particular, when the system was restarted (or resumed from hybernated state), the hard disk LED on the case used to remain on for a few minutes (high hard disk usage) and even the login screen was shown with some delay (some times 2 minutes of delay before the login screen was shown when resuming from hybernate).

I used to think it was because I had installed Subversion. However, I uninstalled this program and it still continued to be slow. Today, when I restarted the computer (and the LED was still on) I checked the Task Manager and noticed the only program that is consuming CPU is bdss.exe (BitDefender). So I Opened BitDefender Antivirus Plus v10 window, went to Antivirus tab and saw that under the Statisitics section, the graph really shows BitDefender is scanning some things. I clicked the More Statistics link and in the new window, I scrolled up in the logs. What I noticed was that BitDefender had scanned lots of files including all of my font files, which I think is unnecessary.

I believe BitDefender is really making my computer start up slower, so I'd like to request this to be reviewed, and hopefully, some of the scans which are not really necessary at startup, may be postponed to the next time the file is really accessed (like font files, for example).

Happy new year!

justineng

Maybe you need to upgrade your system?? Or close the scans.

alexcrist

Hello Huji,

As far as I know, BitDefender doesn't make scans at startup, if they are not needed. Maybe some application of yours (or event the OS itself) accesses those files, making BitDefender scan them. You could use a small tool, FileMon, to see if there are other requests for those files.

On the other hand, I also noticed that BDv10 made more scans at startup then BD2008. Since I upgraded to BD2008, it doesn't scan so much at system startup. Try to upgrade (it's free, for the remaining license period) and see if things get better.

Cris.

Orphan

Hello Huji,

As far as I know, BitDefender doesn't make scans at startup, if they are not needed. Maybe some application of yours (or event the OS itself) accesses those files, making BitDefender scan them. You could use a small tool, FileMon, to see if there are other requests for those files.

On the other hand, I also noticed that BDv10 made more scans at startup then BD2008. Since I upgraded to BD2008, it doesn't scan so much at system startup. Try to upgrade (it's free, for the remaining license period) and see if things get better.

Cris.

Cris,

I'm very confused by your response above. Both v.10 and v.11 have always scanned at system start-up on my machine and I thought this was a normal function. Neither versions scanned after sleep or hibernation.

Can you please elaborate a bit more?

Cheers

Orphan

alexcrist

Of course they scan. It's absolutely normal, because when the system starts up, many files are accessed, many applications are started... and BitDefender scans all the accessed files. What I said is:

- BitDefender doesn't scan, at startup, files that aren't accessed by anything (any files that are scanned at startup are accessed by some applications which, also, start at system startup). This is why I suggested FileMon: to see which application requests access to those files, forcing BitDefender to scan them.

- BD2008 made less scanning, or it was faster, I don't know... this is only based on my observations. I don't really know if something was changed in BD2008 regarding this.

Also, I never noticed BitDefender scanning files after standby or hibernation (just a few seconds ago I resumed my laptop from standby, and no files were scanned). And in my previous post I only talked about startup, not standby and/or hibernation.

Cris.

Orphan

Of course they scan. It's absolutely normal, because when the system starts up, many files are accessed, many applications are started... and BitDefender scans all the accessed files. What I said is:

- BitDefender doesn't scan, at startup, files that aren't accessed by anything (any files that are scanned at startup are accessed by some applications which, also, start at system startup). This is why I suggested FileMon: to see which application requests access to those files, forcing BitDefender to scan them.

- BD2008 made less scanning, or it was faster, I don't know... this is only based on my observations. I don't really know if something was changed in BD2008 regarding this.

Also, I never noticed BitDefender scanning files after standby or hibernation (just a few seconds ago I resumed my laptop from standby, and no files were scanned). And in my previous post I only talked about startup, not standby and/or hibernation.

Cris.

Cris,

Thank you for making your thoughts clearer.

I misunderstood what you meant in this line, As far as I know, BitDefender doesn't make scans at startup, if they are not needed.

I could think of no time when a system would start and not access any files.

Cheers

Orphan

Huji

Do you know what I like most about this discussion (and the forum in general)? There aren't people who just say "It has nothing to do with BitDefender, so goodbye!" People really try to assist you. And FileMon was a big help indeed.

Now, in order to pay my donation, I'll let the future visitors know how I approached my slow resumes from hibernate:

I started FileMon, then hibernated the machine and resumed it. Then I saved the log, removing the part logged before I restarted the machine (i.e. logged during hibernate process). Then I imported the tab-delimited saved log file to Access (so I can do some analyses on the data).

What I noticed was, explorer.exe had accessed some files about 2750 times, and bdss.exe did it 1431 times. However, there was one weired process named "rndal.exe" (belonging to Real Player) which accessed some files for more than 9000 times while my computer was resuming from hibernate! What was more interesting was that it accessed C:\PROGRAM FILES\REAL\REALONE PLAYER\REALPLAY.EXE more than 5000 times (why is that needed during a system restart?!) and more interestingly, it also accessed C:\PROGRAM FILES\WINDOWS MEDIA PLAYER\WMPLAYER.EXE about 500 times (has Real Player gone obsessive about Windows Media Player?!)

Anyways, I killed that process, hibernated again, and resumed again, saving a new log file. I analyzed this new log file in Access, and this time, bdss.exe was called 1673 times, and explorer.exe was called only 386 times. Most importantly, this time my computer didn't really go slow when resuming from hibernate.

So in the end, I decided to think it was rndal.exe which caused all this problem. And guess what! Like always, the executable which annoys you the most is the executable which is used to "autoupdate" a software! (I hate Adobe's autoupdater, and some others).

I uninstalled Real Player!

alexcrist

So in the end, I decided to think it was rndal.exe which caused all this problem. And guess what! Like always, the executable which annoys you the most is the executable which is used to "autoupdate" a software! (I hate Adobe's autoupdater, and some others).

I uninstalled Real Player!

Yes, auto-updaters might make too many checks when they search for updates, which cause BD to scan the same files too many times. Also, this behavior can appears on both startup and resume (from standby/hibernation), depending on how the auto-updater is configured to search for updates.

What I really want to find out now, is why am I not experiencing the same things as you, because I also have RealPlayer installed. Maybe I just have an older version (which has a different auto-update system), or I just disabled that feature (because I also have a habit to disable auto-update when I don't really need it). I'll have to check on this.

Anyway, I'm glad that I could help you and thank you for your appreciations.

If you have other questions, don't hesitate to post.

Cris.

Huji

I did another change which made my system go to hibernate mode and wake up from there "a lot faster". I found the solution on this page a few minutes ago.

I updated my boot.ini file from such:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn

to such:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=AlwaysOff

Apparently my system doesn't have good support for Data Execution Prevention (DEP). The above change turns this off, and really boosts my system's startup.

I thought I should post it here, so people would find it more easily. By the way, I think more modern devices (motherboard, CPU) support DEP well enough, and that change is not needed; my machine is about 3 years old, which may be the reason why my hardware doesn't support DEP well.