Why is it not recommended to have 2 antivirus programs running at the same time?
In: Technology
Specifically, the advice is not to have more than one anti-virus tool actively protecting your computer.
The reason for that is because active-scanning AVs detect when the operating system reads or writes files, and scan those files. So each time you read/write a file, you’ve got multiple AVs fighting over who gets to access the file to scan it, on top of whatever original process was trying to open the file (eg. Word for a document). At best this causes poor disk I/O performance. It can also cause deadlocks (two processes waiting on each other for file access).
AVs also scan processes running in memory. It’s possible the AVs will try to scan each other, and maybe fail because AVs tend to run with special OS privileges that make it inaccessible to other software, but that’s never been a problem in my experience.
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