Excessive Update Size
Comments
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You fail to mention which update you refer to, signature and support files and components (several times a day) or the occasional product minor/patch update. Nor can one guess what or when you mean by "frequent."
For this week so far, my total of update downloads added up to about 40 MB.
The product update is much larger but that is to be expected. So far, there have been four since December if I recall correctly. There is not much you can do about that outside of your nightly solution.0 -
Updates are welcome for me... update are good and ton of update is a good new : updates keep you protected. it's true that I have unlimited download/upload gb .
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Updates are essential for the product to continue providing the level of protection you'd expect.
Other than toggling the automatic updates off and continuing to do the updates when it suits your network allowance, I don't see a better solution other than perhaps a separate toggle for virus definitions and product update, you may wish to add that to the suggested features forum.
Best of luck.
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a separate toggle for virus definitions and product update
That in fact was the way things were in most AV products. But the dependency of defs and product (especially behavior and heuristics) got to the point where updating one and not the other broke the product, or worse, the system or enterprise it was running on or in. History is peppered with that failure scenario, albeit rarely, and by some of the biggest players in the industry.
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The OP is correct. I have been monitoring definition updates by setting them to demand confirmation before downloading.
Definition updates have been 87MB a day on average.
Product updates have been minor in comparison, less than 1MB a day.
This is several orders of magnitude bigger than other antimalware utilities and renders Bitdefender unsuitable for anyone with a limited data allowance.
The reason that Bitdefender definition updates are so large is that Bitdefender downloads & replaces whole modules.
Most other antimalware utilities download changes to modules and the utility itself integrates those changes into the modules themselves - so there is much less to download each time.
So, for example, another antimalware utility might download 87KB of changes to modules whereas Bitdefender will download 87MB of changed modules.0 -
Hello,
The updates themselves are 25-75 MB, when a product update is released.
Bitdefender being permanently connected to the Cloud as many of the services are cloud based to take the load off the user's machine, within that reported 87 MB average you also have all the cloud queries powering the protection on your machine.
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Sorin,
The size of updates I have reported is correct. It does not include anything else as you can tell from the way I obtained the data - the dialog produced by setting the updates to seek permission before downloading identifies the size of the definitions update and the size of any product update separately.
The results I posted do not include product updates. They are measured separately and were insignificant during the week I monitored.
The results I posted do not include "all the cloud queries powering the protection on your machine".
Over the course of the week, the average daily total of definition updates was 87MB. This was of great concern to the OP and is also of great concern to me. I asked BD tech support if there was anything I could do about it [Ref 2016051812010002] but have not yet had any reply. I have had to reduce to weekly manual updates pending resolution and that is rather risky.
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Sorin,
The size of updates I have reported is correct. It does not include anything else as you can tell from the way I obtained the data - the dialog produced by setting the updates to seek permission before downloading identifies the size of the definitions update and the size of any product update separately.
The results I posted do not include product updates. They are measured separately and were insignificant during the week I monitored.
The results I posted do not include "all the cloud queries powering the protection on your machine".
Over the course of the week, the average daily total of definition updates was 87MB. This was of great concern to the OP and is also of great concern to me. I asked BD tech support if there was anything I could do about it [Ref 2016051812010002] but have not yet had any reply. I have had to reduce to weekly manual updates pending resolution and that is rather risky.
I have now received an email from BD support -
Your suggestion to introduce incremental updates is a great idea and we will try to implement it in the future. We have forwarded it to the Bitdefender product manager a feature request, in order to be approved for further product development. If the change is implemented we will send you a separate e-mail at that time to let you know.
If I ever get such an email I'll post again in this thread to let others know.
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The concept of "update" relative to product and definitions needs to be clarified.
•Product update: in which the product version is changed, i.e. 20.0.27.1467 to 20.0.28.1478 defined by the industry standard major.minor.patch.build. Reboot required.
(This is not to be confused with BD's "Antimalware Engine version" number, as of this writing, 7.65748. This is presented in update.txt which arrives every time files are delivered to the plugins folder. BD is not really updating half a dozen or more times a day what is popularly called The Bitdefender Engine. That is version 11.0.1.12 and has been for a long time.)
•Definition update: historically those files that end up in the plugins folder. As the technology evolved, other supporting files existing outside of the plugins folder joined the queue for other components. For example avc3.* for Active Virus Control and ph_sign.* for Antiphishing. As well various db and dat files. Occasionally, product libraries, etc. will "sneak in" (like avcuf64.dll) and without requiring a reboot; these are few and far between and barely contribute to the definition update totality.Anyhow...
All those metrics have me befuddled. According to my network monitoring, these BD apps recorded these inbound data in the previous seven days during which there has been no product version update:
18.8 MB - Bitdefender Update Downloader - downloader.exe
11.3 MB - Bitdefender Security Service - vsserve.exe
07.2 MB - Bitdefenter Wallet Agent - bdwtxag.exe
18.3 KB - Bitdefender Agent - bdagent.exe (Yes, KB.)
01.0 MB - Bitdefender Main Interface - seccenter.exe
02.8 MB - Bitdefender Agent - productagentservice.exe
(If BD leverages svchost.exe in any way, I'm not monitoring the BD-specifics of such activity.)
41.1 MB - TOTAL
During this same week, total usage for all inbound Internet activity was 952 MB.
I wonder how my BD environment functions so well considering it downloads hardly anything within the construct of the numbers posted in this thread??
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I was also wondering where all of my data was being used up and also experienced the 87mb per machine daily after installing Glasswire.Please advise what is happening about the incremental updates otherwise I will need to change from Bit Defender as I cannot afford using 174mb per day just on internet security for 2 machines.
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As an alternative how can I get Bit defender to automate the download of updates only overnight 12:00 - 6:00am when it can use night time data (early bird) 5Gb instead of completely using up my precious 5Gb of daytime data. Would I switch off auto update and run what program as a scheduled task?
Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.
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