Archi 4.10 Released Version - Performance Issue linking with Windows Defender

Started by Xiaoqi, September 21, 2022, 01:31:12 AM

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Xiaoqi

Hello,

Not sure whether this is new & common issue, but I'm observing some performance issue after upgrading from 4.10 Beta 2 to 4.10 formal release at Sept 15.

Setting the context first:
  • we use Archi in the team with around 10 modelers, most of use are still in v4.9.3, with coArchi 0.8.4 plug-in to use one remote repo hosted in Azure DevOps site
  • model scale as elements ~7500, properties ~5200, and relationships about 17K
  • we normally do local merge between user and master branch first, ensure it's no conflict then publish to remote, every member follows similar practice
  • our working PC are running on Windows 10 with Windows Defender enabled by company policy, myself use Windows 11 already

I did upgrading to Archi 4.10 formal version at Sept 15th, after that, I started to feel slowness myself, as well as getting some colleagues' feedback. Since all network situation are not changed too much before and after, I'm quite curious to monitor from Task Manager, and see the process "Antimalware Service Executable" is one typical relevant with Archi.exe. Whenever I do either branch switching or publish or merge, the first step of Archi(coArchi) is trying to "look for changes", during this looking period, normally Archi.exe can occupy 15%~25% of my CPU time, but this "Antimalware Service Executable" process can occupy about 70%~85% of CPU time, and this inter-relationship are existed during the whole Archi.exe processing period.

From the first picuture, you can see, before this 4.10 formal version, (we have several standarized steps to do the time counting) it can be 1 minute around for certain step, but the date Sept 18 (actually started from 16th I remember) testing, it got slower to 3 and more minutes for finish one step, however, Archi.exe as the process is not dead but just cannot response since CPU time is used out.

After observing some while, two steps testing performed as below on Defender's Virus & Threat Protection part:

1. first I added exclusion to the folder which stores or model-repository locally, in Windows, that's by defuault in c:\users\(ID)\appdata\roaming\Archi4\Model-repository: after that you can see the big different that I measured at Sept 19th date, almost down to the similar to Sept 15th when I was having v4.10 beta-2.

2. then I proceed to add exclusion on process Archi.exe, it's getting magically further improved performance, even down to some better one equivalent to some dates in Apr.

Hope to update you all on this investigation, I'm also ask my teammates to perform some testing on different PC while they're upgrading to v4.10 now, however, I'm not quite sure whether Windows Defender had any latest change, or our v4.10 formal version has something made negative scanning result from Windows Defender, just the strange things happened right relating to v4.10 upgrading.

One guess is, by default, Windows Defender is scanning all changes from executable programs as well as files on PC's disks, since Archi with coArchi plug-in break down the ".archimate" single model file into folders & files per XML structure, our model has 28,257 files with 1,935 folders, without exclusion, I can imagine this kind of scanning may take time.

I can only treat this kind of "exclusion" as one workaround for now, looking forward to get any comments and suggestions.

Regards,
Xiaoqi



Phil Beauvoir

This is a known issue with Eclipse/Java based apps with Windows Defender. Have a look at these links:

https://www.eclipse.org/eclipse/news/4.25/

> Windows 10 users: Windows 10 Defender significantly slows down Eclipse, reason being Windows 10 Defender scanning the JAR files. The problem has been reported to Microsoft here. Until then, a workaround to this problem is to add Eclipse root directory to Windows 10 Defender's exclusion list, detailed steps are shared here.

https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=548443

https://github.com/microsoft/java-wdb/issues/9

This can affect Archi startup time, but once it is launched it should be OK. The problem comes with lots of files produced by coArchi.
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Xiaoqi

Thanks Phil, it works fine for me.

I've updated the exclusion list to both Archi program folder (not ony Archi.exe process, as JAR files are inside) and coArchi repository folder. Believe this can help a lot for most of us.

However, one of my colleague is still experiencing extremely slowness (some steps are taking 5+ minutes), we're troubleshooting further to see whether any other factors, e.g. network (using VPN or not), can affect this.

Regards, Xiaoqi