AV-Comparatives.org, October 2008

In October 2008, AV-Comparatives, a respected Austrian research laboratory, tested the performance of various antivirus products. The test compared how long it took to copy files with an antivirus product functioning with default settings, and how long the same task took with no antivirus program running.

A reduction in CPU performance is most noticeable when the user interacts with various files on the hard drive. This test was designed to reproduce typical user behavior to evaluate how much the tested antivirus solution affects CPU performance.

The diagram shows how the various antivirus solutions affected the performance of the computer while copying files. The smaller the percentage, the less the performance was affected: