McAfee and My MacBook

I was given a MacBook at work, and I decided to install Eclipse and the Android SDK to do some investigation around Android Mobile development.

I noticed that I had a 45 second delay in getting a Hello World function to compile and output to standard out. Loading up the Android Emulator tested my patience. I used to have a coworker who was incredibly impatient, and anytime there was a delay in getting a report or data, she would always yell “I can feel myself aging. I’m getting gray hairs just standing here…” or some variant of those phrases. This is exactly how I felt.

It turns out that although Java and Eclipse have a terrible reputation for speed, the actual culprit was the McAfee anti-malware software installed on the MacBook. Specifically, “McAfee on-access scan protects your Mac from threats in real-time.” There is a setting for “Maximum Scan Time” that you can set, the default for me was at 45 seconds. You can reduce that amount to 1 second, but I actually just disabled the virus scanner altogether to save time and prevent gray hairs.