Is anti virus a battery hog? My university makes you download an anti-virus and something called safeconnect in order to connect to the internet (eduroam). I'm very careful and wouldn't have either on my computer if it was up to me, but unfortunately I have to adhere to their policies.

I downloaded sophos anti-virus for my 2016 tMBP and think it might be draining my battery. When I go to my activity monitor it says SophosServiceManager is using >99% of my CPU, but on the other hand it says SophosUIManager's energy impact is 0. Here's the entires I see:

CPU: 

Energy:

Memory: 


Does anybody know if an anti-virus is usually a power hog? Is there anything I can do about it?
Yes, AV is a battery hog.

You are looking at three different processes, actually. The first is SophosServiceManager, which looks like the process that is actually doing the scan.  It looks like it's taking tons of CPU (and thus battery).

SophosUIServer probably just displays the little icon in the menu bar, and takes almost no memory.

SophosScanD is yet a third process.