Tech Forum

Hello All

After installing Sophos on 2 of our Stake PC's, they have slowed to a crawl. By crawl I mean 10-15 min boot times and 5-10 min MLS login times. Plus, I get several calls/email each day w/ complaints from the clerks who use them. I'm supposed to install Sophos on all the others PC's, but am holding off until I have more information. Anyone else having similar issues? Anyone found any "solutions"?

Maybe someday the church will start leasing/purchasing PC's w/ sufficient hardware specs to last the 3-5 years they are intended to last....just a thought

K

kylejhunt wrote:After installing Sophos on 2 of our Stake PC's, they have slowed to a crawl. By crawl I mean 10-15 min boot times and 5-10 min MLS login times. Plus, I get several calls/email each day w/ complaints from the clerks who use them. I'm supposed to install Sophos on all the others PC's, but am holding off until I have more information. Anyone else having similar issues? Anyone found any "solutions"?

We noticed a slight slowdown on startup after installing Sophos, but no more than a minute more. I've seen no change on MLS login times. And this was on really slow Celeron machines.

How much memory do your machines have? Those old machines I referred to had been upgraded to 512MB from the original 256MB.

More information would be helpful. What kind of machine? How much memory? Is it on broadband?

I've installed Sophos on a 5 year old machines with the original 256MB of memory and didn't see this. However, if you have broadband, then Sophos will update itself, and that may be a factor.

Our machines all have 256K of RAM. They were slow to begin w/ but now it's laughable. The problem is that now we have to purchase RAM just to be compliant w/ SLC's request to install Sophos (not really complaining, just stating fact).

These 2 machines to have broadband...when it works I have noticed that they are even slower during the Sophos update, but it's not enough to worry over.

So the only suggestion is to add RAM?

kylejhunt wrote:So the only suggestion is to add RAM?

When we installed Sophos on our really slow Celeron machines, it didn't make much difference. We have a broadband connection. I can't imagine your machines are any slower than ours were, so the only obvious difference is that we had 512MB RAM and you have 256MB RAM.

When others see only a minor slowdown after installing the same software, it certainly makes sense that a dramatic slowdown would be related to tight memory. When installing new software starts to cause lots of memory paging, the performance hit can be significant. So I would think it's reasonable to conclude that doubling the RAM would make a significant performance improvement.

Before you buy memory, have the STS check with the FM group on the replacement plans. Many of the 256MB machines are up for replacement. It was supposed to be under the 5 year plan, but that's been stretched a bit because of the economy.

I'm waiting for a response from our FM group and Stake Presidency. Hopefully a replacement is pending cause these machines are OLD. If not we'll proceed w/ a RAM upgrade and I'll let you know how it goes Thanks!

If you only have 256MB of memory you are going to have a slow down. Sophos will use most, if not all, of that in the first few minutes after boot-up and log-on while it updates. For a celeron GX270 running 512MB Sophos grabs 56% of the cpu cycles and a good portion of the RAM.

If you can wait until Sophos is finished updating before starting MLS this may help somewhat. This takes anywhere from around a minute to about three minutes after boot-up.

More RAM definitely helps.

kylejhunt wrote:The problem is that now we have to purchase RAM just to be compliant w/ SLC's request to install Sophos

That's right! We had to do the same thing with all our GX-270 computers when I installed Desktop 5.5, including Symantec Anti-Virus. All the clerks in the stake complained about the slowdown. I told them to buy more RAM out of their budget funds.

Dana