Antimalware Service Executable excessive hard-drive usage/hogging

On both my Windows 8 machines, Antimalware Service Executable periodically utilizes 100% of a hard drive, and any user operations involving that drive slow to a crawl.

1.  On my Lenovo T530 (i5-ivy bridge) laptop, the service would max out my disk performance for minutes at a time on startup.  My laptop would be sluggish and unresponsive until the service quit hogging the disk.  Periodically my laptop would slow to a crawl at other times, and when checking the task manager it would always be the fault of this service utilizing 100% of my disk performance.  I eventually avoided this problem by upgrading to an SSD.

 2.  On my Xeon workstation with Adaptec hardware RAID the service actually manages to completely max out the performance on a RAID 10 array.  I was alarmed with simple copy operations stalled, and when I checked the task manager, sure enough, antimalware service executable was using 100% of the array.

Antimalware Service Executable behaves completely differently from Windows Search.  Search immediately slows to idle when user operations are underway, and does not make any noticeable impact on performance.  The Antimalware service never slows in response to user activity; it hogs the drive until it is finished with whatever it is doing.

Has anyone else observed this problem?  Is there a solution short of disabling the service entirely?

  • Edited by daflory Sunday, January 27, 2013 5:48 AM
January 27th, 2013 8:47am


Has anyone else observed this problem?  Is there a solution short of disabling the service entirely?

Yes, I also see this (also with MSE in Win7) and the only solution is to disable the service. Microsoft ist too arogant to investigate this issue and ignored it during all MSE beta-tests.
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January 27th, 2013 10:33am

This is definitely a problem. I'm going to try and deprioritize and/or disable it.
January 17th, 2014 9:03am

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