Windows, Caché and virus scanners

Article

Murray Oldfield · May 26, 2016 1m read

I have seen a customer problem recently where the use of a virus scanner running over Caché databases was causing intermittent application slow downs and bad user response times.

This is a surprisingly common problem, so this short post is just a reminder to exclude key Caché components from your virus scanning.

Generally virus scanning must exclude the CACHE.DAT database files and Caché binaries. If an anti-virus is scanning CACHE.DATs and InterSystems files then system performance will be significantly impacted.

Specifically anti-virus software must exclude Caché files including the following:
* Caché databases (CACHE.DAT).
* Caché executable in the Ensemble/bin or cache/bin directory.
* Write Image Journal (WIJ).
* Journal files in the journal directory.

More details are available in the online documentation.

Latest Caché documentation

Discussion (2)3

John Murray · May 27, 2016

Murray, the documentation section you link to recommends excluding certain directories as well as specific files. This makes me nervous, as having a scanning exclusion on an entire directory surely offers a safe haven for malware to write a payload that it subsequently executes. Can you explain the reasons for excluding entire directories?

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Jenna Poindexter · May 27, 2016

Reading the documentation it seems to be saying that you should exclude directories containing files that are actively used by Cache such as those containing databases, WIJ and journal files, etc.

It is not recommending that you disable virus scanning on all directories associated with Cache

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