Suggestion: Mulithreaded scanning for multiple HDD's at once

[CodeblueHawkesBay]

Hi

 

I have noticed some scans will take quite a while if there are multiple hard drives installed as the scanner will only scan each drive sequentially. I suggest the scanner run with multiple threads to scan two or more drives at once.  I believe this alone would significantly improve scan times in multi HDD systems.

 

Kind regards

Tyler Henderson

Trusted Advisor

CodeBlue Hawkes Bay

[John L. Galt]

And at hte same time will produce some significant heat as you have multiple HDs spinning and running as well as multiple cores on the CPU too.

 

I think a better solution would be multiple core but retaining the single HD at a time methodology.  No sense in stressing out the PSU (and other components) , as not everyone has modern machines, nor machines that were built in the last 2 months, o machines that are well maintained and cleaned often.

[CodeblueHawkesBay]

And at hte same time will produce some significant heat as you have multiple HDs spinning and running as well as multiple cores on the CPU too.

 

I think a better solution would be multiple core but retaining the single HD at a time methodology.  No sense in stressing out the PSU (and other components) , as not everyone has modern machines, nor machines that were built in the last 2 months, o machines that are well maintained and cleaned often.

 

Perhaps a good compromise would be have sequential scanning as the default setting but allow users to enable multiple HDD scans?  I am eager to reduce scan times on many multiple HDD machines and I believe this would be a great to way to see that happen.

[daledoc1]

Hi:

 

I am just a home user, not an MBAM staffer or computer expert.

 

However, in addition to John L. Galt's expert advice as well as any official feedback from staff, I will just mention that routine Full scans with MBAM are neither recommended nor necessary.

For routine scanning, Quick scans are all that is needed - that will save both time and disk wear.

There is a bit more info about the different scan types here: What is the difference between the three scan types in Malwarebytes Anti-Malware?

 

Cheers,

 

daledoc1

[John L. Galt]

Hi:

 

I am just a home user, not an MBAM staffer or computer expert.

 

However, in addition to John L. Galt's expert advice as well as any official feedback from staff, I will just mention that routine Full scans with MBAM are neither recommended nor necessary.

For routine scanning, Quick scans are all that is needed - that will save both time and disk wear.

There is a bit more info about the different scan types here: What is the difference between the three scan types in Malwarebytes Anti-Malware?

 

Cheers,

 

daledoc1

 

Thanks, daledoc1 - good info to know.

 

Perhaps a good compromise would be have sequential scanning as the default setting but allow users to enable multiple HDD scans?  I am eager to reduce scan times on many multiple HDD machines and I believe this would be a great to way to see that happen.

 

In light of daledoc1's post, but also considering your specific need (as well as the needs of SMBs and Enterprise users) I can agree to your compromise allowing the user to select how to scan HDs.

[Firefox]

I would like to see the use of multiple cores first myself...

[John L. Galt]

Agreed - and all of this is contingent upon the face that the scanning engine won't kill the entire workload of the CPU by enabling and using all cores.  And that the scanning engine will be able to easily handle all of the process routines and subroutines in a single core - for all we know it could already be using multiple cores in ways we didn't consider, such as reading with one core and verifying against the database with another core.....

[Firefox]

I have several computers that have 8+ cores on them... it would be nice to see what it could do with Malwarebytes in a multi-core program....

[John L. Galt]

I have 2 machines with 4 cores + 4 HT cores, but one machine with only dual core, no HT.  That machine would not benefit from it at all.

 

And other people still running XP on single and dual core machines would have a big problem as well.  But making it an option, as CodeblueKawkesBay suggested, would ensure that the older machines would not take a performance hit.

[AdvancedSetup]

I have a system with dual Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2660 (20M Cache, 2.20 GHz, 8.00 GT/s Intel® QPI) with 8 cores and 16 threads for a total of 16 cores and 32 threads but disk I/O is not really affected all that much by the CPU once you reach a certain point as the disk I/O is the bottleneck and the CPU just sits and waits. I know that we have discussed it and I'm sure we will probably look at it further in the future but it's not currently #1 on our list of planned improvements that I'm aware of.

Multitasking - Microsoft

Processes and Threads - Microsoft

Multitasking Considerations - Microsoft

Differences Between Multithreading and Multitasking for Programmers

Understanding Disk I/O - when should you be worried?

[Firefox]

Wow! and I thought I had a supped up rig.... that one blows mine out of the water...

[John L. Galt]

Built a rig a couple of years back to assist in Biological research.

 

8 * quad core processors (totaling 32 cores)

16 * 4 GB RAM (each cpu was allocated 4 slots of RAM, and each CPU got a pair of 4 GB sticks

6 * 1 TB HD in (I think JBOD) array

 

Mind you, this was the summer of 2008 0_o

 

It was the backend for a database server that we were using to demonstrate DNA sequence matching tools (at the time, the now defunct GCG Tools).

 

The front end?  27 iMacs - running OS X Tiger 10.4 and dual booting with Windows XP

 

Gotta lobe government grants....