Bamboo antivirus exclusions

Summary

Although we cannot directly recommend specific antivirus software to use with Bamboo, we would like to advise our customers that if you are experiencing slowness with Bamboo, try running it with virus checking disabled. Whilst performing scanning and inspection of files, disk I/O and CPU usage can increase, thus slowing Bamboo performance. In some cases, this reduction in performance can be dramatic and can even render Bamboo impossible to use.

Environment

All support versions of Bamboo.

Solution

Depending on the antivirus software, it may be possible to exclude certain files from scanning:

• Bamboo installation directory

• Bamboo home directory

• Bamboo Agent home directories

• Any database-related directories

  You can refer to Locating important directories and files for more information.

Some antivirus software may continue to impact Bamboo even if these folders are excluded. If slowness is experienced, try running Bamboo with antivirus services disabled. In some cases (like Symantec endpoint protection), stopping services may not be sufficient and the removal of antivirus software should be considered when troubleshooting performance issues and other related problems. This can occur for many reasons, such as filter level drivers on Windows, and kernel modules for Linux security applications.

Excluding the above locations may prevent functionality problems with Bamboo that are caused by interference with individual files and file handles (ie. antivirus software locking files or quarantining them), but performance problems may still occur, especially if anti-virus or security software is still actively generating I/O requests to the same underlying physical disk by scanning other non-Bamboo directories.