Post updated in August 2025 to include links to IRIS.
I have seen customer problems where the use of a virus scanner running over Caché or IRIS databases was causing intermittent application slowdowns and bad user response times.
This is a surprisingly common problem, so this short post is just a reminder to exclude key Caché and IRIS components from your virus scanning.
Generally, virus scanning must exclude the CACHE.DAT or IRIS.DAT database files and the InterSystems binaries. If an anti-virus is scanning *.DAT files and other InterSystems files such as journals and binaries, then system performance will be significantly impacted.
Specifically, to avoid performance problems anti-virus software must exclude InterSystems files, including the following:
- Databases (CACHE.DAT/IRIS.DAT).
- Executable in the
bin directory, for example /iris/bin.. - Write Image Journal (WIJ).
- Journal files in the journal directory.
More details are available in the online documentation.
Latest Caché documentation
Latest IRIS documentation