New fan :)

I’m sorry that you feel that way. I feel that it’s important to note that it only uses 100% of your processor while you are actively running the scan. If you were to throttle the CPU utilization then it would only make the scan take longer.

Have you found any other anti-malware plugin that scans every file on your site without using all your CPU?

You should also understand that I have written the code for the Complete Scan to by split into small parts that get executed over multiple CPU threads in a linear stack, specifically to take advantage of all available CPU that would otherwise be idle, but reduce the impact on other simultaneous threads. For example: If you only had two other processes running at 10% CPU each then my plugin might use up 80% CPU if it is able, and this would show that you are running at 100%. However, if you them started up 17 more PHP processes that all wanted as much CPU as there was then each one would only get about 5% of the CPU (including my plugin, and that would probably slow down the scan if it kept up like that for a while). Also, because the scan process is broken into small linear tasks, it would not queue up the task chunk until the current task is finished (about once or twice every second) so that if you had other requests landing in the queue it would put them first and queue up the next scan task after those.

So I hope this addressed you concerns about the CPU usage and I hope you understand that there is a lot more going on in your server than just one simple metric to measure overall performance and efficiency. If you have any specific grudges or concerns about how the performs, or if you have seen any evidence that CPU handling is adversely affecting the site while running the scan, or if you have an example of a better scan method, then please contact me. I am always happy to improve my plugin wherever possible.

You can also email me directly if you wish:
eli AT gotmls DOT net

I can see why you are “looking for a more affordable option”, Malcare wants a minimum of $99 for each site before they will even show you what problems they’ve found. Their plugin starts uploading your files to their server before you even ask them to run a scan, so the CPU hit on your end is only a one-time upload process (and I assume smaller update jobs thereafter, whenever files are changed), that way they are able to do all the heavy lifter on they own server and not do any real-time scanning on your server.

My plugin runs the active scans on your server only when you request one, and I don’t upload all your files to my server. So you can find and fix all these Know Threats on your server for FREE with my plugin. The only down side, as you mentioned, is that you are using your own servers resources to perform these free scans.