Bitdefender CPU usage abnormally high

I too have had this problem. It seems to occur when I initially boot-up my system. I have a gauge on my desktop the shows CPU, GPU, drives, etc. and bdservicehost seems to run in the neighborhood of 87-93% upon booting. My solution has been to reboot the system and the CPU runs at the normal range and I no longer see bdservicehost in my processes hogging everything. I have had no luck in switching it off or delaying its starting at boot.

I wish there was another solution than what I have come up with though.

I am also having this problem and requesting a refund. "Light on system resources," HA!!!

I see the same problem, according to Redit BitDefender Devs know about this and are working on it - how about they tell the mods in the official support forum!

I am also having this problem. I'm using the newest Total Security on a modern Thinkpad, a decent machine, but CPU usage for bdservicehost is always between 20%-60%, except sometimes very briefly after start-up when it can be under 1%. I don't know when this began, but I noticed it about a week ago. I switched to Total Security from regular Bitdefender Antivirus a few weeks ago. I have tried re-installing twice, that didn't work. I contacted support 6 days ago, and the only advice I've received in that time is an email suggesting that I re-install. It has now been 4 days since that email, and I've received no advice since then.

I'm about an hour away from uninstalling Bitdefender and trying another company's product. What else can I do, really?

If support is reading this, my ticket is 1005642863.

I run the family version of BD and when I go to task manager it says that BD parental control is hogging 46% of my kids device constantly. Sort this out BD.

Having this issue too. As I type this bdservicehost/Bitdefender Virus Shield is consuming over 16% of my CPU while doing, supposedly, nothing. It is keeping my CPU temps in the mid 40’sC when they normally idle at around 30C

However, at certain times, I’ll check and the same process will be using less than 1% and my idle temps will be fine.

Even turning off ALL protection, the virus shield will continue to use 16% or so of my CPU, no matter what. It’s like BD is running some type of scan in the background that the user has no control over nor is able to see. Also, my hard drive light is going nuts so it definitely looks like it is doing some type of hidden scan

I am about ready to kick BD to the curb over this. It has to stop.

I have done a complete uninstall(CPU usage goes back to normal) using the uninstall tool and reinstall but it continues. BD 2020 didn’t have this issue for me.

EDIT

it is the Real Time Protection that is causing this. If I disable it and reboot, my CPU is at 3% and no hard drive thrashing. Once I turn it on the Real Time Protection, the hard rice goes crazy and CPU usage sits at 16%. This goes on for an HOUR OR MORE on an i9 10900 machine.

it should NOT be doing this for that long or even at ALL unless it is doing a full scan.

**EDIT 2 **

I have to remove this for the time being. Been running my CPU at 16%, thrashing my hard drive and keeping my CPU temps a good 10-15 degrees higher than normal for several HOURS now.

Please FIX it ASAP. This thread is quite old too and has been going for a while.

Just reinstalled BD after a 3 month "protest uninstall" was pushing up CPU and Ram constantly. Has been fresh installed (latest version) and after an hour back to thrashing my Mac, same for all 5 of my machines.

Tried all the fixes last time, not interested in spending the time again, so cancelling my auto license renewal, you have not addressed this issue in years now 😑

I only experienced the 100% HD activity after I did a full system scan a few weeks ago.

Since then I've narrowed it down to 3 processes, one of which was bdServicehost.exe. I eliminated the other 2, but on start-up, bdServicehost.exe continued to thrash my drives (mirrored RAID) so I uninstalled Bitdefender and put something else in its place. That has resolved my problem.

Only problem now is my account does not have the option to cancel Auto-Renewal.

Are ther any other options for cancelling auto-renewal?

This dropped my cpu usage on my Macbook air by about 50%. I also excepted

/Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb but it didn't seem to make much more difference. It still says "scanning new files".

I started to have the same issue on a brand new installed PC (win10, 21h1, I7 CPU, 32Gb). Even after deactivating all modules, still it takes huge CPU load. Any solution found? Other than uninstalling it?

I've had BD hog resources for a fair while now. Taken it off i3 and i5 laptops. Tonight had to disable everything as it ground my PC to a halt. If my i9-10900F 32gb RAM machine can't handle it, god knows what lesser machines will do.

However, this was when I was downloading a 28GB update for something. As soon as that update was finished, I restarted all the protection and CPU usage went down from 16% to 1%, and power sage went from Very High to Very Low.

BD has an issue with hogging resources. My 3 year subscription comes to an end shortly, and I cancelled my auto renew (which elicited a 30% discount straight away!) as I think it time to look at the competition.

I have this same issue, powerful i7, 64 gb ram,

Memory pushing 94% and locking up my system cause the bitdefendor helper .. 2 minutes for ditching my 5 licenses and going some where else. I bet its mining crypto like Nortons complete over reach of power!!!

Hello,

Is everyone using the latest 26.0.10.45 version?

@Kashtan I can assure you Bitdefender's only task is to protect your devices.

If you are still encountering this issue after the latest update, I would recommend contacting the Technical Support Teams, as more information might be required to troubleshoot this. The engineers will request some logs from you, in order to find the root cause.

You can get in touch with our engineers by choosing one of the contact methods available here:

https://www.bitdefender.com/consumer/support/

Best regards.

I have mine set like yours. Intel i5 2.40 Ghz, 16 GB of Ram, Windows 11 Pro 21H2.

Hi @DavidBrogg,

Kindly contact our Technical Teams for further assistance, as they will require logs from the machine and a remote session might also be necessary, if the logs don't reveal the root cause.

You can get in touch with our engineers by choosing one of the contact methods available here:

https://www.bitdefender.com/consumer/support/

Stay safe.

Hello @909,

We're still waiting for the developers to confirm the fix. Unfortunately, I don't have an ETA at the moment, but I can assure you it is work in progress and all parties want to get this resolved as quickly as possible and unlock the resources assigned for this investigation.

Thank you for your understanding.

I have been experiencing this problem for over a year now. Bitdefender, You're losing a customer today.

Actually, this issue seems to have been going on since at least 2006. I switched from Kaspersky due to concerns about software from Russia. I relied on your advertising.

Your software obviously has serious bugs, you've known about it for years, "require logs from the machine and a remote session" are canned responses. I haven't seen anybody reporting the "logs" and "remote session" helped.

I can't allow my computer to be 'down' for hours at a time due to your software.

I realize getting a refund is impossible, all I can do is spread the word Bitdefender has serious, fatal issues that it hopes potential buyers won't discover till it's too late.

Somebody is going to put together a Class Action and end up with whatever is left of your company, assuming all your customers haven't already quit.

My partner and I have had this CPU issue, now we no longer use Bitdefender. Best move ever!

We now use Emsisoft Anti-Malware for our PCs, and Emsisoft Mobile Security for our Android smartphone. Unfortunately there isn't an option for the Apple crowd.

What a difference in using Emsisoft. Wish we had ditched Bitdefender months earlier.

So if anyone reading this forum is wanting to use something else, give this a trial and see if it suits you. I will make note that the Anti-Malware for PCs is Windows only, not Mac. And is Windows 10 or 11, not earlier Windows (like 8 and 7). Also, it uses the Windows Firewall and not its own.

Emsisoft Anti-Malware for PCs:

Emsisoft Mobile Security for Android 5.0 and up:

https://www.emsisoft.com/en/home/mobilesecurity/

Hello,

Before anything else, I would recommend to stop unnecessary background processes and disable as many programs set to run at startup as possible. This will help. The known issue aggravates the situation, but it's not the only culprit, as we've seen so far.

Furthermore, as different machines are involved and several reports have been made in this community, but also in the support department, the best way to move forward would be to stay in contact with the engineers for investigation, workarounds, device optimization and updates concernig this known issue, which DOES NOT affect all Bitdefender users. Clearly, there is pattern here and the only way to know for sure what is causing it for each machine in particular would be to get the logs and connect remotely to the device, if necessary, to further advise on the next steps.