Over the past week I have been playing with Symantec Endpoint in preparation for a migration from Symantec Client Security 10. Endpoint is basically the next version of Symantec’s anti-virus with a firewall and antispyware combined. The management server seemed to have way more features than the previous version, however the interface is not any more intuitive than before. Now, I’ve always noticed that symantec’s products are huge resource hogs, so I was surprised to notice that the size of rtvscan.exe had only a fraction of the mem usage of previous versions. However on further investigation on several test machines I found that the usage was actually rediculously higher. I’ve compiled a chart showing the differences in the usage. I had four test machines running on VMware virtual machines. Two windows xp clients, and two windows 2003 servers, one as a client, and the other as a management server. Both Endpoint, and Client Security 10 memory usage is shown.
| XP SP3 | No client | 110 mb |
| XP SP3 | Client Security 10 | 190 mb |
| XP SP3 | Endpoint | 283 mb |
| Win2003 | No client | 90 mb |
| Win2003 | Client Security 10 | 266 mb |
| Win2003 | Endpoint Client | 285 mb |
| Win2003 | Symantec 10 Server | 555 mb |
| Win2003 | Endpoint Server | 1037 mb |
| Win2003 | Endpoint Server w/ Management program open | 1403 mb |
All the test machines has a fully updated system with nothing running but the Symantec program, wiht the exception of the Symantec 10 server which was also running several smaller inhouse apps. The management program uses java, (another pig) which explains the high use of memory when the management app is open. I attempted to do PCmark benchmarks, however it didnt like the virtual machines.
This is an horrible misuse of memory. The program’s size on disk is less than all that. Several posts by developers on symantec’s forums mentioned that they tried to reduce the memory footprint. Not sure how they thought they were doing that. I am hesitant to start rolling this out, because I know that all my users will start complaining about their machines slowing down. I am running the endpoint client on my machine, however its a brand new Dell and has plenty of resources to spare. I just need to install it on a Vista machine for the ultimate bloat experience.