What used to be possibly the lightest antivirus package you could get for free, is now quite heavy on memory usage, especially during a scan. While Comodo seems to have improved its memory efficiency in recent times, Avira appears to have gone in the opposite direction.

Some small surprises were Comodo, Bitdefender Free and Avira for different reasons.

For efficient memory usage, Avast is the no.1 free antivirus by far. Idle resource usage was also very impressive. During scanning Avast kept flushing its memory every 10 seconds which kept usage at a very low level, and it should never grow above a small number of Megabytes.

Avast is the most popular free antivirus around today, and its memory usage is quite impressive.

You’ll also note that both Working Set and WS Private were very close together so it’s also not consuming shared resources from other programs.

On the positive side, Webroot SecureAnywhere proves that cloud antivirus packages can be extremely efficient in memory usage, and it was very good in both idle and scanning scores.

Do note that ZoneAlarm does include a firewall though, and doesn’t have a version without it. ZoneAlarm was also very high in both scores during scanning while the Sophos Working Set score more than doubled.

It was quite a surprise to see a couple of antivirus packages actually using an average of nearly 200MB while sitting idle.

At the other end, red is the heaviest and orange the next most memory hungry. The colors are self explanatory with green the lightest antivirus and yellow second best. The result tables are simply split into two, one for the idle memory usage and one for the usage during a virus scan, both in alphabetical order. Scan Private Working Set (KB): Resets every 10 seconds Scan Working Set (KB): Resets every 10 seconds Processes Monitored: AvastSvc.exe, AvastUI.exe

Webroot SecureAnywhere AntiVirus 2013 8.0.2.127 Processes Monitored: cavwp.exe, cis.exe, CisTray.exe, cmdagent.exeĢ. Processes Monitored: PSUNMain.exe, PSUAService.exe, PSUAMain.exe, PSANHost.exe Processes Monitored: ccsvchst.exe, ccsvchst.exe, ccsvchst.exe, ccsvchst.exe Processes Monitored: agent.exe, iptray.exe Processes Monitored: utsvc.exe, UnThreat.exe Processes Monitored: avgcsrvx.exe, avgemcx.exe, avgidsagent.exe, avgnsx.exe, avgrsx.exe, avgui.exe, avgwdsvc.exe Processes Monitored: fsgk32.exe, fshoster32.exe, FSM32.exe, FSMA32.exe, fsorsp.exe, fssm32.exe, fsblsrv.exe Processes Monitored: MsMpEng.exe, msseces.exe, NisSrv.exe

Avast taking too much cpu