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Microsoft Security Essentials RAM Usage

By on September 30, 2009 in AntiVirus Reviews

I got into a little discussion on our Microsoft Security Essentials forum about MSE’s RAM consumption. It seems that most people really focus on RAM usage as being “a problem” for almost all Anti-virus applications; however IMO CPU is what everyone should be concerned about. If your AV is spiking your CPU too often THEN you’ll see a major slow down in running other applications on your PC. The only time I’ve ever had trouble with AV RAM usage is on Windows XP with 256 MB of RAM (about 5 years ago).

Anyway, check out my ram usage for my main box at home:

The MsMPEng.exe is Microsoft Security Essentials @ 65.5 MB of RAM. Is my system slow??? NOT AT ALL. If anything “worried me” it would be firefox @ 311 MB RAM.

Here’s another screen shot of Security Essentials running a quick scan. CPU is about 16-20% and ram jumps a bit to 82.6 MB.

So what if my RAM usage jumped to 300 MB of RAM? I could care less! I have 6,597 MB of RAM free. Now, if CPU was always 25-40% while MSE was doing nothing then I’d immediately uninstall it. I’m sure MANY people will disagree with me and cling to the old days of 256 MB of RAM but I think things are drastically different now guys, RAM is not the concern it once was for software (AV in this case).

Please +1 this post if you like me :)

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  • http://www.google.co.uk James

    i agree with you matt people are being silly if it used like 100mb – 150 then i would worry but a lousy 60 meg thats nothing i even installed security essentials on an dell inspiron 8000 with pentium III 900mhz and 512mb ram and it still worked seamlessley

  • ryan

    matt, do you think MSE will have a better detection rate then avira in the future?
    there just about the same now.

  • JJ

    He said he’s installing it on all 6 of his home computers.

    That tells me he prefers it to other free AV.

  • ryan

    cant wait for him to review the final copy…. of mse :) )

  • AHOPF

    me too i cannot wait for the final review

  • 927

    same detection rate as avira!??
    how do you know that ryan??

  • ryan

    927 there just about the same Microsoft has a big advantage now i heard they are teaming up with Symantec now. If that’s true they will catch up very easy and there could be probably more people that may want to join in.

  • f

    Some people just have bad computers

    now if an app took 500mb ram, i would be pissed. Most computers only have 3gb. Some computer only have 2gb, so having an app that takes 100mb may be significant since vista takes quite a bit

  • malwarekilla

    I’m sure the final review will be close to the beta (as they usually are).

    Also, I just used MSE on 2 clients tonight with excellent results! MSE cleaned adware bound to IE…which saved me an MBAM scan.

    Time is precious in my business and I thank anything that gives me more of it…

  • Rolf

    311 Mb ram usage by firefox seems very strange. For me firefox is currently using 54 Mb right now.

    I have also noticed that MSE is using more ram on XP than on Windows 7. On Windows 7 MSE consumes about 30 Mb.

  • atanos

    RAM consumption, who cares :)

    At least I don’t. Well ok, I do if av takes something like 700Mb, but when talking about 50-200Mb it doesn’t matter at all. Memory is meant to be used, having over 2Gb of RAM and still letting it not to be used is just idiotic ;)

    My concern is only on CPU usage, not on Ram usage, it’s the only thing people should be looking at.

    Btw, I’m running on Vista Home Basic 32bit SP2 and have 2Gb of RAM. Vista uses RAM between 600Mb-1300Mb depending how long I keep it running, how many apps are open and how many browser windows/tabs are open. And Superfetch is enabled, so even it preloads some apps it also will free RAM if it’s needed on somewere else.

    So anyway I don’t get this thing about RAM usage, RAM is meant to be used. Just stop looking at the RAM usage and start looking at the CPU usage, that’s what really counts! ;)

  • nis

    NIS uses a lot less ram

  • http://mafiatown.gram.pl Thermalcake

    @atanos:
    And what about people who have still 256 or 512 MB of RAM?

  • atanos

    @Thermalcake:

    Yes, I’ve seen those, but having such low amount of RAM causes lots of other broblems, so people have started to upgrade their machines or bought new PC.

    By problems I mean that everyone remembers XP at the time when it came on market? It didn’t require much RAM at that time, but these days XP needs atleast that 512Mb to just run properly. Web browsers uses a lot of RAM these days, so even using them on older machines is slow.

    Just a while ago I had old PC as backup, it had Intel Pentium3 series processor 700MHz and 512Mb of RAM, XP Home with SP2, and even installing Avira slowed it down even no other apps running on the background. Browsing on the web was difficult and slow. And Avira is one the most lightweight avs out there.

    World chances, so does softwares and hardware. If someone is stil running on those amount of RAM I recommend to upgrade it as soon as possible. System requirements goes up constantly on all kinds of softwares and soon we are in the situation when even 2Gb of RAM just isn’t enough…

    But a this moment 1Gb for XP and 2 Gb for Vista are enough to run operating system and any kind of antivirus, not sure about Windows 7.

  • JJ

    If you only have 512MB of RAM I would focus your research on low RAM apps. You may have to pay more to fit your special needs. Surely you don’t expect that segment of the market to be mainstream anymore. It is now a relatively small and declining customer base.

  • malwaredestroyer

    well what do I have to say I have only 1gb of ram?

  • Vishal Shah

    So true Matt ram isnt the concern for AV software is was before what would really concern me now a days is internet browsers though i use chrome when i used to use firefox it alwasy spiked to 300 MB of ram but i could care less! seriously i have 8GB ram with a vista home premium 64 bit OS do ram isnt exactly a concern for me with this computer i got yesterday (my old one had only 1 GB ram so then we would have to be more aware) anyway you are so right Matt

  • Rolf

    I cant understand that everybody has problems with firefox ram usage. For me it has always been the most ram friendly browser…

  • Dan

    @ Rolf..

    I think that it also depends on how many plugins people have installed in firefox..

    I have 8 plugins installed, and firefox uses aroung 80-90mb.

    But i dont care. It runs fast anyway..

  • Carl

    If you think that FF uses a lot at 300mb, then I have good news for you – my (newest version) Opera uses a stunning 900 megabytes of ram with just 12 tabs open! (Firefox using 300mb with 32 tabs). :)

  • Mike

    Something people need to realize is that memory IS a concern. Ideally, no personal computer comes with enough memory, be it 4GB or 16GB. Software is designed to use a LOT of memory, and when the memory isn’t enough virtual memory takes over. The theory is that Hard Drive space is cheap and people can always afford more, so ‘theoretically’ software can use as much RAM as it wants. The problem with that is that virtual memory is literally over a million times slower than RAM. So for myself personally, I think an Anti-Virus program should use as little memory as possible.

    Also, Firefox is a memory hog (I still use it because it is very customizable), but even so it should not be using 311MB of RAM.

  • Z

    High memory consumption is not browsers fault. It’s content fault :) If you open only text webpages memory consumption will be low. But if you open pages with lots of images, video and flash it will consume a lot. Check memory consumption with your popular websites one by one.

  • Armand Burél

    I installed mse today to my laptop, I used avg free edition before. Mse uses 72mb ram, but I forgot to look how much avg used. Then I uninstalled avg from my desktop computer, and AGAIN forgot to check how much it took ram.

    I don’t want to re-install avg just to check ram usage, so if somebody please could tell how much is avg free edition’s average ram usage?

  • Armand Burél

    Ok I did uninstall mse and re-install avg to make sure. Avg takes about 20mb ram in multiple tasks. But I noticed, that when avg is in charge, system-task uses about 90mb. And while using mse, system uses only 200-400kt. Same thing with my brothers computer.

    So it seems that altough avg:s tasks seem to use less ram, eventually it takes more than mse.

  • http://www.microsoftisasystemhog.com Motorhead

    QUOTE: atanos October 1, 2009 at 10:46 am
    RAM consumption, who cares

    Without any apps running up front, your memory should always be at least 50% free.. I don’t treat it any different than a hard drive, fill it up and things start to slow down. Why would I run MSE when AVG take up about 8mb of ram? Why would anyone run MSE in that case. So what, you have 20gigs of memory. If you can save the space, why not? That creates less of a load, longevity and leaves more room in case you decide to run something memory intensive.

  • TMG

    I’ve seen usage around 65MB while MSE is scanning, and 25MB while idling, using the 64-bit version for Windows 7 Ultimate.

  • http://www.stuckinstandby.co.cc stuckinstandby

    I installed MSE after AVG and then Avast became bloated and were slowing down my computers. I read that it was lighter than most other AV packages and just as good.

    I see now that MsMpEng.exe is using 160MB of memory whilst idle – same on two different PCs. One of these PCs has only 512MB ram so it runs like a dog until you stop the MSE service.

    Can anyone suggest any light-weight alternatives – I’m thinking Linux!

  • Yoshiyah

    @stuckinstandby How about getting more Ram for that laptop. 512MB of Ram is less than ideal, even with Linux.

  • http://www.stuckinstandby.co.cc/ stuckinstandby

    I’ve installed Mint Linux Debian Edition and the laptop is flying – very nice indeed. 512MB should be perfectly adequate for web browsing. Windows would run fine too, if it wasn’t for all the virus, malware and updater programs which have to run “in the background”.

    I also found that MSE doesn’t like Spotify – at least not on my main PC (dual core with 2GB RAM). It ran up to 100% CPU and stayed there for several minutes. It goes without saying I’ve uninstalled MSE now.

    I’m going commando at the moment until I decide what to do next – generally I know what I’m doing. Also using Firefox with NoScript add-on.

  • Tejas

    Word. We should focus on CPU usage not RAM. That being the case, can you suggest a security suite or AV having low CPU footprint?

  • Mike

    How about showing the Virtual Memory column in your task manager as well ?
    (Bring this up, because i’m working on a slow system, where MSSE is using 70mb normal ram, and 250mb virutal ram)

  • Someone

    How about showing the rest of your RAM via the resource monitor?
    I had been sitting here staring at each applications RAM usage, you add it up it wasn’t adding up to the Performance/”Physical Memory Usage History” graph. I had just turned on the computer and it was using 3GB of 4GB, but I had no applications running.

    I find MSE using 86MB according to Task Manager,
    then in Resource Monitor I get:
    MsMPEng.exe | 2084 | 0 | 204,380 | 102,953 | 15,480 | 86,900
    Its actually using up like twice what Task Manager was reporting…
    My current reads are after killing MSE a few times and my total usage is 1.75GB of 4GB

  • Anonymous

    Wow you look like an asshole


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