CyberSoft News For Febuary 2007
You do not need more memory!
A word about Turbo (Part 1)
Memory. You may or may not know it, but most electronic devices we use in our day-to-day lives utilize some form of temporary storage - cell phones, PDAs, DVD players, televisions, car radios, and computers. If the system processor (CPU) had to retrieve every piece of data it needs from the hard drive bit by bit, it would be overloaded to the point of inoperability. Keeping information in memory allows the CPU to access this data quickly, but some programs can take up large amounts of memory processes. This usually sparks a reaction that more memory is needed, which can be costly.
One issue we hear about from our customers is that VFind™ - the main virus scanner in all our toolkits - is taking up too much system memory, causing processor drag. The main reason for this is because the VFind™ tool is single-threaded, which means that it can only do one thing at a time. When a customer learns how useful VFind™ is, they start using it for many different tasks. If the user has a small window of operation such as processing email or web pages, they will start multiple copies of VFind™ at the same time. After starting 4 or 5 copies, memory problems can develop unless you have a large amount of memory in the machine. One work-around that customers very often try is to start, terminate, and restart copies of VFind™ as needed, but since VFind™ needs to re-compile the VDL list, this could be time-consuming and is not really a viable fix.
So what is the long-term solution for customers needing to have multiple copies of VFind™ run at the same time?
Upgrading to Turbo.
Turbo contains the multi-threaded VFind™ Daemon It not only does more than one thing at a time, but the program initialization costs are reduced because only one program is running. This means that memory utilization goes down to that of one copy of VFind™ while the start up costs are eliminated on a per-process basis. That provides significant improvements in CPU time as well as wall clock time. In other words, if you are trying to do more than one thing at a time, you get your answer faster and at a lower system cost using the Turbo product. This may not be true if you are only doing one thing at a time, like a file system scan. Of course, users who are doing that never complain about memory utilization!
The best part about upgrading to the Turbo product is that you do not have to recode anything. We provide a VFind™ Client tool that directly interfaces with the multi-threaded Turbo, but appears as the single-threaded VFind™ to your program... without any hassle! We will provide more details on how the VFind™ Client program works in next month’s newsletter.
For more information on upgrading to Turbo, please call us at 610.825.4748 or email us at sales@cybersoft.com.
New whitepaper available
President & CEO Peter Radatti has written a paper about CyberSoft’s survivability in the antivirus market, and why we’ll always be the key to your computer security. It is available exclusively at www.cyber.com:
Remember...for all your computer security needs, CyberSoft is the key!
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