Security analyst AV Comparatives has released their 2008 performance analysis for leading anti-virus solutions. Sixteen different products from wildly different ends of the price scale were pitted head-to-head in a battle to prove which application has the greatest impact on system performance.

The results are actually rather surprising or amusing:

• In file copy operations, Symantec’s Norton Anti-Virus was amongst the fastest tested.
• F-Secure was consistently the slowest solution in all tests. The performance impact regularly exceeded 400%.
• Fan favorites like AVIRA performed exceptionally well.

At the conclusion of the testing, just over half of the products were good enough to receive the highest advanced rating: ESET, Symantec, VBA32, Avast, McAfee, Microsoft, BitDefender, GDATA, and AVIRA.

The report is a quality and enlightening read (PDF).