Polling interval

@ wrote:
What does the agent do when the polling interval is reached?  Update definitions, change agent settings, etc.??

Yep - that determines how often the agents check in to the console for settings or agent commands.  

So it does not have anything to do with virus definition files?

Well we don't really have virus definition files, since all the scanning is done in the cloud.  The agent continuously talks to our servers whenever it does a scan, or whenever a new process that it hasn't seen before starts running on your computer.

What are the side effects to just lowering the polling interval down to 15 minutes? It would be nice to have it respond as quickly as posible for when using some of the agent commands.

I don't think there's any downside - the longer polling intervals are for people who are worried about network congestion, so if your network is up to snuff then you should be good.

I don't mean to hijack the thread, but what metric do I judge it being up to snuff? What type of bandwidth will each client use and for how long when it reaches it's polling interval? 

I think any normal network should be fine.  The longer polling intervals are for people so far out in the boonies that they're still on dialup or satellite.  From our testing, each endpoint uses about 3MB per day in back and forth with our servers.

So, I am testing this solution on smaller clients with 5-10 PCs on a 10-20MBit connection. But, I am considering it for our main datacenter with over 2300 clients. Symantec has become a fulltime rec position to manage and I'm getting tired of it. Is there anywhere I can get some solid data on how the system works, and what type of utilization I could expect in an enviroment like that?

You should be fine in that environment, since a data center isn't going to have any bandwidth woes.  We certainly have installations of that size working fine.  If you'd like to talk to one of our folks here let me know.  We also have some customers who are happy to provide info about how things are working in their enviornment if you'd like.

Webroot will not congest your network unless you are on dial-up like Nic said.  We have plenty of business customers who are on T1 and DSL lines that are only 500-750Kb and we do 15 min polling interval.  This should really not be a concern as Webroot does pretty much everything in the cloud.

Then if congestion really isn't a concern, why is the default polling interval set at 24 hours? To me it showed a lack of confidence. 

I do not know since I did not set that polling interval. So you can customize it? Why don't you test out the network congestion and that should make you feel better about it. I am telling you though from our experience, it is pretty light on network traffic.