List of BUGs to fix in the Home versions.

@Nunzio77 there are a couple of other things that I could add to your list, but it's been a while so they may have been resolved by now.

Regarding the Ransomware feature missing in the free version, I have no problem with that in this regard. It may be a shrewd business decision to not include it. Give people the incentive to at least upgrade to the AV+ along with all the other features that are disabled in the free version(s).

If other AV's want to provide that in their free AV, that's okay, but a lot of those people are content with the free version and never support the company by buying a paid version, let alone that they should get full fledged support for a free version? In a way, you may as well use "hardened" Windows Security (includes ransomware), maybe even WFC (which both are using the Windows system environment) uBlock and TrafficLight and have a very competent free security setup.

Just my 2 cents worth, okay, maybe 50 cents worth, lol

Then there are other things that should be taken into account. During an on-demand or background scan performed by Bitdefender it is normal for CPU, RAM, and disk usage to increase. Scanning involves intensive processes that require significant resources to analyze files, folders, and system areas for threats. The temporary increase in resource usage that occurs during the Bitdefender system scan and quick scan is normal. It does not significantly slow down Windows and should not be interpreted as an issue.

bdservicehost is already designed to operate efficiently, however, if users encounter higher than expected CPU and memory usage, we must always take into consideration the user context. At first, it may seem that there's a problem and rightfully so, if the usage goes through the roof and the performance is affected, chances are something is not right or there is an incompatibility between the system and the antivirus. But before making any assumptions, there is always a checklist to follow, and in many cases this operation must be carried out by the Support teams, in the event the basic troubleshooting steps don't make a difference.

Sometimes, even adjusting the scanning options can make a huge difference. For example, you could schedule scans during periods of low computer usage or decrease the scanning frequency. Otherwise, if the antivirus is scanning the whole device whenever you have 20 tabs open and you are also streaming, writing emails and working in other apps, surely you will notice a decrease in performance. Setting exclusions can also help, if the problem appears only when using a certain program or when compiling software into a particular directory, etc. add those specific apps and the folders they are accessing to the exceptions list in Bitdefender.

Bottom line is, we need to take into account what else is happening on the device that may result in this high consumption. The usage context, available device resources and the PC configuration where Bitdefender is installed all play a part in this. I've said this before, the developers wouldn't create a software that is hogging resources and any vendor would get tens of thousands of complaints if that was to happen.

@camarie that is very encouraging to read and hear :) :) Thank you for your post.

"The number one issue it is for me the performance thing. But also here it's a tradeoff between features vs consumption. The number of moving targets (read: components running) is certainly several times higher than, say, 10 years ago, and as you correctly observed, an older PC or laptop might suffer more than a modern device because of this".

"But aside this, we are committed this year to do a full analysis regarding the memory consumption and efficiency overall".

I think one area Bitdefender should try to improve is the update process. Currently from I see is that Bitdefender on every signature update writes about 500 MB data on average. It seems Bitdefender downloads the update, verify it, move a large portion/the whole of the old database and create new database files containing older database + recently downloaded signature update. This process is rather lengthy, consumes decent CPU power with higher-than-average disk usage. But this 500 MB data written on average becomes 800+ to sometimes 1 GB when multiple updates are missed. I could be wrong, but it seems Bitdefender maybe once a day update its whole engine or something like that. I see that the folder in this region "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Bitdefender\Bitdefender Threat Scanner" changes its version number every day. When this happens, Bitdefender writes the most amount of data on disk. As I said, it could range from 800 MB to 1GB or maybe even more. So, this is a lot of daily disk writes IMO. It's also time consuming compared to other products.

Now I have to give some comparison to properly elaborate it as well as I can.

In comparison, Kaspersky writes from 110-180 MB data on each signature updates. They release less signatures everyday compared to Bitdefender as they rely on their cloud a bit more for detecting new malware.

ESET also have similar disk writes like Bitdefender from 480-700 MB on each update (depending on files on your PC as they scan some areas after every single update), but their update process is somehow ridiculously fast. Only take 5-6 seconds for the update process. Some excessive disk writes come from their startup scan which they perform after every signature update which is a bit strange.

Avast takes a different approach. They use streaming signatures. They download 2-3 KB file every couple of minutes. So, their product and users are always up-to-date. No need to download signatures 5-6 times a day, no need to worry about missing signature updates. They seem to update their whole database once or maybe twice per day. This way they keep their users up to date with almost no impact caused by the signature updating process.
I don't think Bitdefender can come up with something like this as this would need a massive change both on the product as well as on the cloud infrastructure. Then again, I see online that higher tier Bitdefender Enterprise can be used completely cloud-based way without any local signatures. So, cloud-based detection with less database on the disk is probably possible.

My last example is Sophos. I haven't noticed this by myself but a friend of mine told me that Sophos update small updates every day a couple of times which is separate from their main signature database. For a whole month, the update is downloaded on that particular set of separate database and then every month they merge these daily updates to their main database and repeat the process the next month. For the whole month the size of the database is around 30 MB. This way Sophos also keeps things small avoiding any performance impact caused by the update process.

Maybe a method similar to Sophos can be achieved by Bitdefender.

In the days of SSDs with limited TBW (Tera Bytes Written) value, writing too much data on SSD for updating signature alone is not very ideal IMO even though modern SSDs have very high TBW values. The update process is a nightmare for HDD users. Bitdefender should also probably try to reduce the size of their database. It's quite bulky it seems. Probably the largest in the entire AV industry. Products like Kaspersky, Avast, Norton offload many not so important signature databases to their cloud which helps to reduce the size of local signatures. Also, in my experience Bitdefender often creates IMO many useless signatures that can only detect the particular submitted sample. ESET and Kaspersky are the two most efficient products in terms of signature creation. They try to identify the behavior in the code, create a heuristic type signature if possible, to detect similar malware in the future rather than creating one that detects that particular file only. I'm saying this from the experience of submitting samples to all security vendors (I could be wrong on some things but mostly I'm accurate).

Here's Bitdefender downloading signature update to the "Antivirus-NewTemp" folder.
Yesterday (I think) the main database was in the "Antivirus_73035_015" folder. Tonight after running the VM the new database was created in the "Antivirus_73044_016" folder.
For this, 1.09 GB data was written by the "downloader.exe" process which downloads the update and "testinitsigs.exe" wrote further 360 MB which is responsible for verifying the downloaded database, I guess.
So about 1.36 GB data written for 1 update session. The next signature update would write 400-500 MB more data and so on.
The database and the update process need to be optimized to reduce database size, disk writes and improve signature updating performance.

I hope this is something the Bitdefender team prioritize.

Please correct me if I've unintentionally provided any wrong information @camarie @Alexandru_BD or anyone else.

I'm a newcomer from this month and a little bit surprised at the fact that Search Advisor for Windows has been dead for a long time without any prospect in the foreseeable future.

At the end of the day, I was told by Bitdefender Support Center:

"the situation is caused by an issue that has already been acknowledged by our development team"

"I will get back to you with an update regarding the fix as soon as we have one."

But the third bullet in the first paragraph says "users will be given false expectations" and I'm one of them.