Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac Home Edition

[rjpennstate4]

Hi! I have a Mid 2012 13 inch MacBook Pro with OS X Mountain Lion on it. I downloaded Sophos for Mountain Lion today and I am trying to run the first scan, and it freezes when it gets to a 
.dmg file. I have had Sophos on my Mac's before and have never had a freezing issue. I click and hold down on the icon in the dock and it shows that it's still running fine, when it's not. 
Even when I still had Lion on this machine, it would give me this trouble, but I didn't think anything of it until now. I had a Mid 2007 MacBook with Lion on it, before this machine, and had 
no problems with Sophos. It also slows my MacBook Pro down some too. Please advise!
Thank You,
Raymond Ludwiczak

[Agile]

When you say "freezes", is the animation on the progress bar still moving?  What's inside the dmg that it is currently scanning?

I ask, because DMGs are treated like archives, and are uncompressed and their contents are scanned, during which time the progress bar does not... progress.

Also note that some DMGs, while being small on the outside, like the Tardis can be very big on the inside (even if they only contain a few small files).  Prior to scanning, Sophos extracts the entire volume image from the DMG file; so if the volume image is terabytes in size and only holds a few kilobytes of actual data, the entire multi-terabyte volume is still extracted for scanning.  You're probably finding that this is the step causing the slowdown.

[rjpennstate4]

The progress bar does not move and it is a game called Real Racing.

[Agile]

Sounds like it's likely the DMG size at fault then.  If you mount it, how big does it say it is?

[rjpennstate4]

Sorry. It's actually Lego Batman as I am trying to rescan now and it came back up, and I got it in the Mac App. Store. So I don't even know why there is a .dmg file for it or where to find it. I know the actual game when you download it is a few GBs in size. 

[Agile]

Ah; the DMG would be in the App Store cache, I would think -- while downloading, this would be in your ~/Library/Application Support/Appstore/ folder; afterwards, stuff gets moved right to the /Applications folder.

My guess is that the .app actually has a .dmg hiding inside it (right click, view package contents).