Synology Antivirus Essentials VERY SLOW Scan (3% after 4 days)

I have begun to experience a spike in scanning times. (DS920+ with 8GB RAM expansion and 2x512GB nVME cache)

I happened to open the package on Wednesday afternoon and saw that it had been in the scanning process since Sunday 06:00 and had reached about 15,000 files with 3% completion. A day later, I cancelled the operation, which had progressed only to 20,000 files (but still showing 3% completion).

As a test, I ran a Custom Scan on a shared folder containing only PDFs and EPUBs, 481 MB for a total of 96 files. This took 15min29sec.

I’ve had this setup for about 5 years and the bulk of the file content and package set-up has remained largely the same. I keep regular tabs on snapshots and other redundancies, on recycle bins, and on other places where “debris” can stack up. How could a Full Scan go from taking a couple hours under a year ago to taking over 4 days to get to 3% completion?

Does anyone have any insight? (Yes, I’ve tried the common recommendation of deleting and re-installing the package to clear caches and logs; it didn’t help.)

A few other things to check: Are you running the latest version of Antivirus Essentials? Are there any other packages running at the same time? Is the system Indexing at the same time?. You may also want to take a look here if you haven’t already: Synology KB | Antivirus Essentials slow