Tip of the Month for: July 2012

Antivirus Programs and Potential Slow-Downs with Answers

One of the biggest support calls/questions we get is, "Why does Answers run slow on my PC, but not on others?" or "We noticed a recent slow down in processing, but didn't change anything in regards to the server."   We have found two scenarios for which this happens most of the time.   The first (and the more unlikely) culprit is due to having something wrong with your internal network setup.   This could be anything from having a frayed network cable to having a dying router/switch to having a dying network port on your PC.  

The other reason (and the one that occurs 95% of the time) is due to the antivirus/firewall product that is installed on your PC.   Nearly all of today's antivirus products have the capability to perform "real-time" virus/malware/spyware scanning.    Sometimes, this scanning is causing a network performance slowdown.   This is due to scanning of network drives, which Answers uses to process data, or scanning of the key process which runs Answers through the AcuCOBOL framework (a program called wrun32.exe).  You may ask, "Why did it start all of a sudden?"  Usually, this is due to an automatic update being pushed to your PC that enables these features.  

In this month's tip, we are going to help you track down the ways to help tackle this antivirus issue.   Each antivirus product has its own terminology, but you can typically find ways to exclude these slowdowns by looking for so-called "exclusions", "white lists", or "trusted sites".    Some of these products have two or more lists to update, one for regular virus scans, one for real time scanning, and one for running processes.   The important setting you need to make is exclude the "H:" drive (or whatever letter your Answers drive is set up on) from both the regular and real time scanning exclusions.    Sometimes you may even see any option to turn off scanning on network drives.  You do want this turned off since the actual server is performing the scanning on there, thus eliminating the "double work".    If you have an exception list for running processes, you will need to browse out to find the wrun32.exe process.   This is usually located in the following location: H:\Acucorp\Acucbl\AcuGT\bin\wrun32.exe.

Once these settings are in place and you have restarted your Answers session on the PC, the results are usually instantaneous. 

One final tip of advice, if you have a current version of Microsoft Security Essentials, there is not a way to exclude processes from the real-time scanning.  You can exclude it from the virus scanning, but not real-time scanning.  For this reason, we recommend staying away from this product until that has been resolved.   Among the replacements you can possibly find, we recommend Avast for a free virus scanner and typically recommend Symantec End Point for a paid solution.    We currently also do not recommend McAfee products due to their memory/resource "hogging" tendencies.