Microsoft Security Essentials Performance test

Today I grabbed the release version (v1.0) of Microsofts new Security Essentials package (aka Morro) and decided to run a quick and dirty performance benchmark to compare it to a couple of other AntiVirus/Malware solutions.

I tested on an old Celeron 2.2ghz laptop with 512mb ram and Windows XP SP3.

I did the following measurements:

- Boot-up time (from switching on until notepad.exe in the startup folder was running).

- Avatilable physical memory (after bootup has finished)

- Total memory usage

- Deep and Standard scan of a folder containing apx 8000 files /10 gb.

- CPU usage during scan.

First out was Avast version 4.8:

- Boot time: 76 seconds

- Available physical memory: 261 mb

- Total memory usage: 249 mb

- Full deep scan: 1140 seconds

- Standard scan: 260 seconds

- Resource usage during scan is shown below:

Next was ESET NOD32 Business 4.0:

- Boot time: 98 seconds

- Available physical memory: 296 mb

- Total memory usage: 182 mb

- Full deep scan: 290 seconds

- Standard scan: 175 seconds

- Resource usage during scan is shown below:

And finally Microsoft Security Essentials :

- Boot time: 80 seconds

- Available physical memory: 251 mb

- Total memory usage: 261 mb

- Full deep scan: 757 seconds (when selecting a foldertree you're not able to select scanning method)

- Standard scan: n/a

- Resource usage during scan is shown below:

Conclusions:

NOD32 has the lowest memory footprint and the fastest full scanning (although I suspect that it didn't scan inside all archives), but boot-up time is slightly slower than the Avast and MSE. CPU usage during scan is a little lower with Avast than MSE and NOD32, but for all practical purposes you probably won't notice any difference. In fact all these solutions seems to do fairly well on my old, slow laptop.

All three solutions found the malware and viruses I had put in there for the test.

So which one would I choose?

Probably NOD32 if I had the money to spend (especially for business purposes since the business version integrates with a central policy server).

If I had to go for a free solution I would choose MSE. It seems to perform as well as Avast, but has a better and more intuitive GUI (although I miss some advanced options that Avast have). In addition I won't have to go to Avasts webpage to register every year (I have previously installed Avast for friends and family, and this renewal process that Avast requires is really confusing for a lot of people). MSE is basically set-it-and-forget-it.

My only worry is that I have a feeling that Malware/virus-makers are going to target MSE directly if too many people start using it :-)