My apologies for the delay in posting this new antivirus benchmark results. The report was in fact ready since last week but only a selected amount of forum members gets to see it first to report on any typing errors. If you didn’t know, even if you have the fastest computer in the world, ALL antivirus is capable of slowing down your computer and I strongly believe that we have the right to know the real truth on how slow can the computer get with a particular antivirus software. Most if not all antivirus website claims that their antivirus is the FASTEST or LIGHTEST but after putting them into 18 different benchmark tests, it doesn’t really seemed like what it claimed.
One of our reader Liam K. posted in the comment that the well known fact of the two least memory-intensive antivirus programs are Avira Antivir for free and NOD32 for paid. Whether it is true or not, there are millions of users on the Internet using different kind of antivirus software and it is just not possible to ask them to uninstall their current antivirus and use either Avira or NOD32. Everyone has their own opinion on which antivirus works best for them and hopefully this benchmark tests that I am doing will help everyone to know why certain actions they perform on their computer seemed slower than before.
The antivirus are tested in a very fair manner where all the steps and methods are performed exactly the same on every antivirus. Default settings on the antivirus are used during benchmark since most users doesn’t change the settings. Antivirus developers would have known about this and adjusted the default settings to suit most users. It is not logical for the antivirus developers to enable the paranoid mode by default where it prompts the user for action on every little thing they do on the computer.
The good thing about the current method which I am using to display the chart is via FusionCharts where it uses flash to generate the chart in real time based on an external XML file. This allows me to easily add more benchmark results to the chart in future. For your convenience, I have also calculated the percentage difference to show the difference between using an antivirus and without the antivirus. All you need to do is just move your mouse cursor over the bar at the graph.
It takes a few hours to complete all 18 benchmarks on one antivirus and currently I have only tested 20. I will continue to benchmark more antivirus software whenever I can and update the chart. You can access the latest antivirus benchmark from http://www.raymond.cc/antivirus/ or from the top navigation bar where it says “Lightest Antivirus Test“. So far I’ve noticed that most of the time there won’t be much difference on the performance for the same brand of antivirus but different product. For example, the performance of Kaspersky Antivirus and Kaspersky Internet Security is pretty much the same. Do take note of the version number as well because newer builds could have better performance.
Oh and by the way, if you have a Facebook account, don’t forget to hit the Like button on the antivirus benchmark page to show your support on the new antivirus benchmark test.