This past week, we reported a problem wherein users found their newly installed Windows 11 23H2 systems were getting bogged down, and for some of these people, resetting Defender fixed the issue. While this problem falls into the category of a bug and is not a characteristic of Defender, past anti-malware assessments have shown that Microsoft Defender does hog the system sometimes, though it is hardly alone in that regard.
Both AV-TEST and AV-Comparatives released their newest assessment report recently and in this article, we look at how the various anti-virus products that were tested stack up in terms of system/performance impact. (Check this article instead if you are looking for details regarding malware detection ranking.)
First up, we have the results of AV-Comparatives' October 2023 Performance Test. While Microsoft Defender was good in most of the categories, it did not fare too well at archiving/ unarchiving (compression/decompression).
The testing was conducted on Windows 10 64-bit and if you are wondering how much of a difference a Windows 11 system could make, we recently tested two separate scenarios where we compared Windows 10 with a clean Windows 11 build and an in-place upgrade. Defender is also not the best in the Installing Applications category.
The worst performer among the popular ones, according to the above chart, seems to be McAfee, while on the other end of the spectrum, we have Kaspersky, ESET, and Avira.
In addition, AV-Comparatives also used the PCMark benchmark suite and combined the scores with its own AV-C score to form a composite Impact Score. In this metric, Microsoft Defender was one of the worst with a total Impact Score of 18.6. Only Total Defense was poorer with 27.0. The best performer was ESET with an Impact score of just 1.4.
Up next, we have the numbers from AV-TEST and they were conducted on Windows 11. Like AV-Comparatives, Defender's performance, here too, is not the finest as it has managed 5.5 out of 6.0.
When we look at the breakdown of the scores in the image below, we see that Defender has done poorly in the installation of frequently used apps category. It has in fact, done slightly worse this time (34%) than it did last time (29%). This also lines up with AV-Comparatives' findings as well. Another category where Defender has regressed is the ''launching popular websites" one.
Moving on from Defender, a rather curious point is that Avast and AVG score 6.0 and 5.5 marks in the AV-TEST Performance category despite both of them being built on the same engine. Here are the breakdowns side by side:
 Avast |
 AVG |
As you can see above, it looks like the system impact the two have is mostly similar except when launching popular websites. For some reason, it looks like AVG is struggling with web browsing situations as it has exhibited a 34% impact even though its performance should be right around Avast's (19%). This does not match up with AV-Comparatives' report and the difference in OS might be why this discrepancy popped up.
Another popular product that's a system hog according to AV-TEST is Norton as it does quite poorly in the 'installation of frequent apps' metric, similar to Windows Defender. This however does not align with AV-Comparatives' data.
Source(s):
AV-TEST || AV-Comparatives
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