To demonstrate the positive effect SmartPeak WLM can have in an environment where regular AV scans are scheduled, McAfee VirusScan Enterprise version 8.0 was tested on a system with and without SmartPeak WLM activated.
Fig 1 Without SmartPeak WLM
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In the first example (Fig 1), McAfee VirusScan Enterpise edition was run without SmartPeak WLM. As the graph illustrates, the amount of CPU consumed varies wildly, averaging 43% but at times taking up to 75% of the available processing power.
Fig 2 With SmartPeak WLM
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In contrast, when the SmartPeak WLM agent is activated (Fig 2), the performance profile becomes far more regular, limiting the amount of CPU the AV agent is allowed to consume, thereby freeing up system resources to improve the user experience. In this example, a Hard Limit has been applied to McAfee VirusScan for illustrative purposes. In a real world environment, it would be more effective to set a Soft Limit on the AV process, which would restrict the amount of CPU it could use when a more critical application or user requested resource, but would grant extra available resource to McAfee VirusScan when no applications with a higher priority were requesting it.