[Qt-creator] Creator, debugging, and Windows virus scanners

[Murphy, Sean]

I'm not sure if anyone has a solution here, I'm working this with our IT people in parallel, but figured I'd ask here as well in case anyone had any ideas.

Our IT people recently changed our virus scanner software (or at minimum changed the settings). We're using Trend Micro OfficeScan. After this change, running the application I'm developing in debug mode is painfully slow. It appears the slowness is as DLLs are loaded into the debugger. I think might be related to the "Real-Time Scan" mode that the virus scanner does, according to Trend Micro's website is: "Real-time Scan is a persistent and ongoing scan. Each time a file is received, opened, downloaded, copied, or modified, Real-time Scan scans the file for security risks." I'm not 100% sure that's the only thing going on though...

Some times I've recorded:
  Test #       Debug Mode Time      Release Mode Time
      1                         42                                         4
      2                         134                                       1.6
      3                         17                                         0.7      
All times in seconds

Test 1: I have the application already compiled in correct mode, and then press the "Start Debugging F5"/ "Run CTRL + R" icon as applicable. The time is from press of that button until application is fully launched.

Test 2: Application is launched, I click on my File->Open QAction to bring up a QFileDialog. Time is from click on the QAction until QFileDialog is fully shown and usable. In debug mode, this is so slow, I can actually see multiple paint events happening, and there's a point where the dialog is fully visible, but the cursor isn't active yet in the line edit. The main delay seems to be a various DLLs are being loaded in the debugging session. The debugger status line (not sure what the official term is) in Creator shows DLLs being loaded, and those occur slow enough that I can read each DLL being loaded. But this step takes over 2 minutes! You can imagine how much that slows down debugging my code when I need to load in the correct file, and I'm waiting over 2 minutes each time I iterate through change code, compile, run, debug, change code again...

Test 3: After canceling the file dialog in test 2, clicking the same File->Open QAction in Test 2. So basically I'm just repeating Test 2 a second time, but in this case the DLLs have already been loaded.

I can't change OS, nor can I change the scan settings myself (corporate policies). If I can give them enough details to go on, they might be able to set up a scan exclusion to help me out, but I need the details of what to give them. Does anyone have any thoughts?

Sean