I installed ClamWin on a Pentium III 533EB MHz computer with 1,2 Gb HDD, 32 Mb RAM, and Win98SE. The scan ran for 4 hours and I stopped it, because it did not seem to finish. I single file is scanned in more than 20 s. What happened? Is it true what I read in the forum that your antivirus is out of gasoline?

The programming language used for ClamWin when it was developed back in 2004 has some limitations that prevent it from being as efficient as it could be. The Clamwin developers (all 2 of them), who donate free time to the project, are working on a completely new version featuring more efficient scanning, real-time/on access capability, and other improvements. There is an Alpha version, but it is not yet ready for testing. The current version number is 0.91.2. There are no promises, but they are shooting for the re-write to be available to users with version 1.0.

You can speed up ClamWin’s scans by configuring preferences to only include file extensions (and directories) that are most likely to contain malware instead of letting it scan every file in every directory on your hard drive. There are about 70 or so such extensions, which you can identify by Googling for �dangerous file extensions.� All file extensions will still be scanned when you scan a single file.

Until version 1.0 is released, if you use the Web a lot, keep a real-time/on access scanner for your primary scanner and use ClamWin only as a backup scanner. It is a very capable scanner when used in that manner, or with an intrusion detection program. It is updated very frequently and now has over 160,000 signatures, many of them generic. It is as good as most of the small commercial antivirus programs at file scanning, and it is free.

I’m just another ClamWin user like you. I hope my answer has freed up a developer for a couple of minutes to work on the new version. If you would like to help, visit the Web site to see how.

Regards,

I would like to add that scanning a single file is not a good reference: it takes some time to load the signature database, which is done everytime clamscan (the scanning engine used by clamwin) is loaded. This would be responsible for most of the 20 seconds it takes to scan a single file. You'll see that if you scan a directory with 2 or 3 files at once, it shouldn't take too much longer.

If you take a look at single file scans on the Virscan service at https://virscan.org/report/7c8f36fb4a793a8015c983f559397e1e.html on the Web, you will see that Clam AV usually has very fast scan times on the files submitted there . Go to the summary at the bottom and click on a file to see. Clam AV is usually second to NOD32 in scan speed there. Is the Linux version of Clam really that much faster than ClamWin?

Regards,

virscan.org probably uses clamd, thus loading the signatures is already done when starting the scan.

That's right--I forgot that it's been said clamd is more efficient than clamscan. And some of those high-powered AVs (like Bitdefender) take up some time "looking under the hood," so they're not really inefficient at scanning.

Anyway, it takes ClamWin 70 minutes to scan my entire 160 GB hard drive for about 50 file types. I usually just scan the Windows directory, which takes about 27 minutes. That's not really too bad.

Regards,