PSANHost.exe slows computer operation

[waterfront]

Hello, Is anyone having a problem with PSANHost.exe slowing down their system? We have been chasing a performance problem for a month and have recently discovered that restarting PSANHost.exe eliminates the performance problem temporarily. The improvement is not permanent (don't know how long it lasts) but it is obvious. I have a case open with support and no answers from them yet. Please let me know if you have seen anything similar. This only started after the last version update a month ago.
Thanks for your help.

[bartblaze]

Good day waterfront,

is this on specific machines or several machines at once? Do you see an increase in CPU or RAM usage?

Please also give me the casenumber assigned to you so I can take a look.

Regards

[robertd]

I'm having a similar problem but it's making the system completely unusable. The computer takes 15 minutes to boot up and get logged in. Sometimes we just get a black screen and have to wait 20 minutes or so for the desktop to appear. It took an hour to get to the task manager where we notice PSANHost.exe using 15% CPU. I then go to the services tab and stop the Panda services. After stopping the services, the system is fully responsive again. Rebooting doesn't help, it just goes back into the same state. I end up going to safe mode and running the removal tools.

I think it has something to do with the agent upgrade from 7.20 to 7.30.02.0000 because I noticed the machine is on that version but it hasn't reported that version to the cloud yet.

[waterfront]

We are having the problem on 25 out of 150 computers. The Panda case number is 04192995. We are the IT department here so please don't suggest the typical remedies. Believe me we have tried them all. We have been struggling with this for a month and only this week discovered that PSANHost.exe is causing the problem.

There is no increase in CPU usage or memory usage. That is what was baffling for all this time. We could not pinpoint what the computer was doing. While looking at one of the slow computers we happened to open Task Manager \ Performance \ Resource Monitor \ CPU \ Processes and noticed that PSANHost.exe had 300 threads. Right clicking then Analyze Wait chains showed multiple treads waiting. We used ProcessHacker to kill that tree and the system performance immediately returned to normal. After some time, the performance does deteriorate again.

Later we also discovered that on a slow computer, PSANHost.exe may only have 70 threads (which seems like the normal number). Restarting the process also restores the performance for a period of time.

Do you know what PSANHost.exe does? Thanks.

[bartblaze]

I'm having a similar problem but it's making the system completely unusable. The computer takes 15 minutes to boot up and get logged in. Sometimes we just get a black screen and have to wait 20 minutes or so for the desktop to appear. It took an hour to get to the task manager where we notice PSANHost.exe using 15% CPU. I then go to the services tab and stop the Panda services. After stopping the services, the system is fully responsive again. Rebooting doesn't help, it just goes back into the same state. I end up going to safe mode and running the removal tools.

I think it has something to do with the agent upgrade from 7.20 to 7.30.02.0000 because I noticed the machine is on that version but it hasn't reported that version to the cloud yet.

Hi Robert,

Thanks for your feedback! Please take a PSErrorTrace if possible with the problem reproduced:
http://support.pandasecurity.com/forum/ ... =25&t=2222

Regards

[bartblaze]

We are having the problem on 25 out of 150 computers. The Panda case number is 04192995. We are the IT department here so please don't suggest the typical remedies. Believe me we have tried them all. We have been struggling with this for a month and only this week discovered that PSANHost.exe is causing the problem.

There is no increase in CPU usage or memory usage. That is what was baffling for all this time. We could not pinpoint what the computer was doing. While looking at one of the slow computers we happened to open Task Manager \ Performance \ Resource Monitor \ CPU \ Processes and noticed that PSANHost.exe had 300 threads. Right clicking then Analyze Wait chains showed multiple treads waiting. We used ProcessHacker to kill that tree and the system performance immediately returned to normal. After some time, the performance does deteriorate again.

Later we also discovered that on a slow computer, PSANHost.exe may only have 70 threads (which seems like the normal number). Restarting the process also restores the performance for a period of time.

Do you know what PSANHost.exe does? Thanks.

Can you give me an example machine name which is currently experiencing the issue? I noticed the console has 7.20 version, so unlike Robert suggests, I doubt it has anything to do with upgrades.

300 threads is indeed not a normal amount. PSANHost is responsible for a whole set of functions, the most important one being responsible for the AV and self-protection.

I saw your case is waiting in the queue to be analysed, so for any status updates, please contact your support contact handling the case.

That being said, if possible, can you also take a PSErrorTrace with the problem reproduced?:
http://support.pandasecurity.com/forum/ ... =25&t=2222

Regards

[waterfront]

We currently have Panda support connected to 3 computers that are affected. I suspect that they are using that utility to gather information about the problem. I will let them do their job and report back what they find.
Thanks

[shelms]

We have the same problem at a few sites. Currently battling a Windows 7 machine with 4 GB RAM, 238 GB free disk space, I3 3.1 GHz processor. PSANHost.exe has 148 threads and 25% cpu. Computer works fine for a couple of minutes and then slows to a crawl. 25 minutes to print a one page document. Currently trying to rip out PEP using dg_7_xx.zip. I have spent four hours on this nightmare on this computer. Other techs had better success ripping PEP out and reinstalling.

[medvedek]

We have the same problem. I think that it's caused by failed updating process. Some files stays in WalUpd\Data\Files folder. When they are removed, the CPU problem is gone, but the agent is still not working properly. We finally solve this by reinstalling it.

For temporary solution you could kill PSANHost.exe process. Run this command: "sc stop nanoservicemain" You can also do it from another computer: "sc \\computername stop nanoservicemain"

[shelms]

Thanks for detail to fix. I previously was able to uninstall the agent and protection before PSANHost.exe ran up the CPU and threads. Restarting and installing again fixed the issue.