Limit CPU and RAM usage

[riahc3]

Hello

Malwarebyte automatic scan IMO is too resource hungry, especially on VMs. Its way way way too aggressive.

An option to limit CPU usage would be nice; Not only in percentage values but priorities as well.

Limiting RAM is much more difficult as the program doesnt know the sizes of the files it needs to scan so I imagine limiting RAM would break scans

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[exile360]

Greetings,

Scheduled scans actually already do run as low priority processes to reduce resource usage.  You may test this yourself by observing the CPU usage by a scheduled scan and then performing the same type of scan manually.  You should see much higher CPU usage by Malwarebytes during the manual scan (assuming you haven't configured it to reduce the priority of manual scans to improve multitasking which is an option in the program's settings which causes manual scans to behave the same way as scheduled scans do).

With regards to RAM usage you're quite correct, though as long as your system/VM has sufficient RAM available it shouldn't be a problem.  Malwarebytes keeps most of its databases loaded into memory during scans as well as for real-time protection when using the Premium/trial version in order to reduce the impact on system responsiveness by eliminating the need to consume CPU and disk resources when analyzing threads and processes for loading databases into memory dynamically as some security products do (they'll often do this to reduce RAM usage but end up slowing the system much more due to the delay of waiting for the databases to be loaded to check new items against them and reduce system responsiveness by consuming those extra CPU cycles on the process of doing so; by keeping its databases in memory Malwarebytes avoids this at the cost of extra RAM usage which typically has far less of an impact on a system's overall performance as long as the system has sufficient RAM available).

[Amaroq_Starwind]

Including an option to switch between using more RAM or using more CPU would be smart. This is also where using Large Memory Pages would come in handy, as that would reduce both CPU and disk usage, as well as reducing fragmentation.

[exile360]

That would require a massive rewrite to the core code of the software and given the fact that the vast majority of systems have way more RAM than is required to run Malwarebytes I don't think that would be the best use of the Developers' efforts.  It really doesn't use any more RAM than most modern browsers and even Microsoft Security Essentials uses around the same amount on a typical system.