Microsoft Smart App Control Impacting Performance

Products

• CA Plex

Issue/Introduction

After receiving new workstations, end users are reporting that CA Plex application in general are operating at slower performance.

After many attempts of finding out the reason, finally found that the Microsoft "Smart App Control" is the culprit.

Here is additional information on Smart App Control - What is Smart App Control? - Microsoft Support

This feature has 3 possible modes: Evaluation, Activated, Deactivated.

When set to Evaluation mode, the CA Plex applications run slow.

When set to Deactivated mode, the CA Plex applications run as expected.

Does Broadcom have any experience with this feature?

Environment

CA Plex 7.2.x and 7.3

Resolution

At the time this KB article was written, Broadcom has not heard about Smart App Control and its performance impact with CA Plex built applications from other customers.

The CA Plex generated application is not getting blocked, but the application performance is being impacted. There are many online discussions related to application performances with Smart App Control, but there is no specific guidelines from Microsoft on how to address/remediate such scenarios. 

Smart App Control is actively scanning and analyzing applications to determine their trustworthiness, which intern degrades the application performance. The reason behind performance degrade could be related to I/O operation, registry, System API etc.

At the moment it is difficult to commit anything concrete on how to address the situation. Most of the users in online forums suggest to disable the Smart App Control.