Norton Anti-Virus vs. Horizons

[Justa Mirage]

I have been having a recent bout with my wife's computer.

I was hoping that when I upgraded the machine, it would also make the game work faster. The game did load and operate faster and better, however...

She upgrades to Norton AV 2007 and ever since then, it takes up to 10 minutes for Horizons to boot, and portalling was just as bad once in-game.

I tried defragging, moving the game to a different hard drive, reducing the settings on the ATI 1950 Pro card, but still no fun.

So I used a program I use at work that scans files and registry accesses, and what do I find... Norton AV is scanning EVERY file that is being accessed from the game system which slows it down to a crawl.

I am temporarily disabling real time scan but need to figure out if by excluding the Horizons directory, will it exclude it from the real time scan as well.

If you have OMG slow loadups and portalling, you may want to look into disabling your NAV.

[Daedalus]

Adding the Horizons directory to the exclusion list should work, but Norton and McAfee products are notorious for ignoring user preferences and instead opting to do things "their way".

I heartily recommend Grisoft AVG. It kicks the snot out of Norton and McAfee product offerings in both AV detection and performance, and as an added bonus it is free for non-commercial use! Find it at http://free.grisoft.com/ (you'll also find their free anti spyware and anti rootkit products there too).

If using a better AV solution is not an option then I hope adding the Horizons directory to Norton's exclusion list will suffice.

[gopher65]

I have been having a recent bout with my wife's computer.

I was hoping that when I upgraded the machine, it would also make the game work faster. The game did load and operate faster and better, however...

She upgrades to Norton AV 2007 and ever since then, it takes up to 10 minutes for Horizons to boot, and portalling was just as bad once in-game.

I tried defragging, moving the game to a different hard drive, reducing the settings on the ATI 1950 Pro card, but still no fun.

So I used a program I use at work that scans files and registry accesses, and what do I find... Norton AV is scanning EVERY file that is being accessed from the game system which slows it down to a crawl.

I am temporarily disabling real time scan but need to figure out if by excluding the Horizons directory, will it exclude it from the real time scan as well.

If you have OMG slow loadups and portalling, you may want to look into disabling your NAV.

Hmmm. I'm having this problem too, and I have McAfee AntiVirus. Maybe this is a more general problem, not related specifically to Norton.

[Justa Mirage]

OMG I am priveledged to have my post be the first to get a Gopher65 new account posting!!



What's up Goph?

[gopher65]

OMG I am priveledged to have my post be the first to get a Gopher65 new account posting!!



What's up Goph?

Nothing much. Just trying to get HZ to run normally on my computer. I've changed quite a bit of hardware since the last time I played.

[lightning claw]

wakes from anisteasha

scratches head

Flat your problem is that norten is bloat where it tries to do to much for a anti-virus program and is in my opion a major resource hag when running i would suggest switching to avg anit virus free or payed it dose not matter you get more goodies when payed but all u really need as anti virus and while your at it avg has published a spy where scanner free as well again if you pay you get more goodies but the goodies might mess with horizons


i will try to help u more if you continue to have problem's or there is a player in the game that can help you if i am not around or do not get back to you fast enough

Lewatcher Not sure but think he can help
Jerhis i know this guy has skill


Long live Horizons
Falls over dead asleep again

[Steelclaw]

Any "on access" scanner is going to slow things down. Horizons has *LOTS* of small files. The overhead for scanning is small, however, because the file itself is small, the time spent scanning the file becomes a noticeable portion of the whole file read operation.

That's the trade-off -- 'security' vs performance.

[Justa Mirage]

Epion... please... I am an IT professional

I know what is going on, thought it would make good sense to let others know of my studies of this problem.

I just was wondering if you could program a real time scanner to ignore Horizons or just find another virus scanner that wasn't so intrusive.

Funny, it is so entertaining to watch paint dry... and the hard drive light *flicker* 2 second pause... *flicker* 2-3 second pause... 10 minutes later, game screen is up but no assets, *flicker*...

[Henry Redacre]

Norton is an exceptional product if you dislike performance, and prefer to have your computer run like it was trying to get through mud wearing diving flippers on it's feet.

[RuneDragoon]

I remember using norton/mcaffee products. I never again will use them, because I found they ate the computer alive, and I'm a bit of a speed freak.

I reccomend that if you want an anti virus that doesn't eat your machine, opt for something like the one from computer associates Etrust thing, which was so accurate yet non resource hungry (Sorry, dont have link), or AVG Free, Which I have been using for a year now and quite enjoy. I dont use the former anymore because it requires a paid subscription, and my 1 year deal for free ran out.

[Dragor]

Justa, I use Norton anti-virus, adding the Horizons directory to the exception list does stop the live scanning of the files in it, at least it does for me.

[Daedalus]

As you may have noticed from my previous post in this topic I am not fond of Norton or McAfee AV products. It is only fair to point out that the problem is not entirely the fault of these on-access AV scanners, it also has a great deal to do with how Horizons reads data from the storage device.

When Horizons reads a file, it does not read the entire file in one go. Instead it reads in a few bytes (yes bytes, not kilobytes), then initiates another API call and reads in a few more bytes from a specified offset. A single 4kb file can instigate 32 or more calls, and the overhead of each one adds to the total byte count involved in the disk operations.

The Horizons client requires a more efficient method of reading in and buffering data from the storage device. This flaw (apologies, I do not know what else to call it) is one of the biggest performance hits within the client and it is a shame because it would take me a few days to write a better method for handling data loading within the client, even without prior knowledge of the code. I would be happy to advise on this matter if it is something the new owners wish to address.

Now going back to my second paragraph. Take a single 4kb file, and scan it once with the AV scanner. Then take the notion that the AV scanner is poorly coded itself, and instead of scanning a file just once, it scans that file every time an offset data read occurs. End result is that the AV scanner is unnecessarily overworked and the game client's performance suffers dramatically as it competes with the AV scanner for disk and cpu time.

This nonsensical post brought to you by the letter C and the number 7.

[cgacfox]

I only run Symantic AntiVirus on my main PC. Isn't Norton also known as Symantic?

[Istaria CS]

We are currently creating a knowledge base article that advises people on how to disable per file scanning for McAfee and Norton (any other out there?). If anyone has these programs and can provide instructions on how to disable it, we'll add this to the knowledge base.

Horizons Customer Support

[D0ZeR]

Epion... please... I am an IT professional

I know what is going on, thought it would make good sense to let others know of my studies of this problem.

I just was wondering if you could program a real time scanner to ignore Horizons or just find another virus scanner that wasn't so intrusive.

Funny, it is so entertaining to watch paint dry... and the hard drive light *flicker* 2 second pause... *flicker* 2-3 second pause... 10 minutes later, game screen is up but no assets, *flicker*...

Justa Mirage, you hurt me I told you it works over on VN boards. It is ok to believe the polock no matter what some say.

I been using Norton longer than some of you have been out of diapers. There is a lot of ways to get it to do what you want.

As far as AVG (free or Paid) It is bad in my book because of the few false positives it can give. Granted it happens more to people who don't update the program. But then again with Norton (symantic) it updates itself if setup right.

Ok back to regulary scheduled program.

[gopher65]

I don't know about Norton (never used it), but McAfee gives far more false positives than AVG does. On my machine McAfee has tagged as Viruses, Trojans, Worms, or Spyware everything from critical windows files to MSoffice files to, heck, pretty much every piece of third party software I download:P. Their Heuristics scanner isn't exactly discriminatory.

[D0ZeR]

I agree gopher Mcafee has always been like that. I also remember back years ago how the install to it would screw up the system.

[AA0]

I stopped using McAfee after a large number of new system I put together would completely screw up the windows install, required a reformat. Years later they still didn't fix the problem, it isn't worth the trouble.. Norton is a massive Hard drive killer, so I'm using AVG now for decent performance, it won't kill games if you forget to turn it off.

[Justa Mirage]

I remember the years when you had to type "SCAN" on a DOS line for norton, as windows didn't exist yet

[Tror Rockplate]

I have no problems with Zone alarm slowing down the loading time.

www.zonealarm.co.uk. - you change to another region for your correct pricing in top right corner of the web page.

I do use and pay for the Zone alarm Security suite and find it very user friendly.