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Whenever I have procmon running the number one activity seems to be teatimer. I believe this is part of the spybot search and destroy program. Why is its activity level so high?

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I notice it as well. Often I just kill it when it gets over-eager. – Randolph West Sep 11 '09 at 14:35
Question is subjective - depends on user-assigned weightage to security, and understanding of oneself's as a computer user. – caliban Sep 11 '09 at 14:47
I have never had problems with it taking up resources. It is indeed part of Spybot. – D'Arvit Sep 11 '09 at 15:55
I changed the original question which admittedly asked the subjective question about system resource drain. The answers covered my real question which was why is it running so much. Thanks. – kpierce8 Sep 11 '09 at 20:20
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3 Answers

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TeaTimer is the part of SpyBot that supposed to pro-actively protects your system from infection and/or spot the infection immediately rather than waiting for you to manually run a full Spybot scan.

As one of the things Teatimer does is watch your registry for suspicious changes you'll probably find that every time another app makes a registry change Teatimer jumps in straight afterwards and checks that this isn't a harmful change. This means that Teatimer is bound to be the top registry accesser as its job is to do nearly as many accesses as all your other apps put together.

Any continuously running spyware/anti-virus/firewall app is going to be a drain on system resources as they're always double-checking what your other apps are up to, whether or not you're happy with the trade-off between system speed and system security is totally your judgement call.

Teatimer is only an optional part of the Spybot install, you don't have to install it if you don't want to.

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up vote 2 down vote

The reason why it is the number one activity is because you are not doing anything else at the moment except for looking at Process Monitor.

It answer depends on how much you value security, and the balance you strike between having more resources, or having better security.

If you think you are a super-safe browser, and you have good surfing habits (i.e not clicking on weird links, running Firefox, does not download warez), then I'd say yes, it's a drain on system resources.

However, if you constantly click on links that say "Find the girl of your dreams today!", or "Make your organ larger!", etc... then I'd say you'd better keep teatimer on even if it uses up 50% of your CPU.

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up vote 0 down vote

Is this a drain on system resources?

it sure is, big time.

run your web browser (and other web-related applications) in an isolated environment (i.e. Sandboxie) where they belong and be done with superfluous gimmicks such as 'Teatimer'.

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Sandboxie doesn't drain system resources? ;) – imagodei Sep 11 '09 at 15:02
i would not consider a memory footprint of 12 MB and zero CPU usage a major impact on the system performance. – Molly7244 Sep 11 '09 at 15:31
For future clarification This refers to the original question which I changed to, "why does is its activity so high?" – kpierce8 Sep 11 '09 at 20:22
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