Tenable has published official performance comparisons between Nessus 4, Nessus 3 and Nessus 2. We strongly encourage anyone interested in performing this type of performance analysis to follow the comprehensive methods we used in testing. The major findings of our testing include the following:
- Nessus 4 was up to five times faster than Nessus 3 on Windows.
- Not only does Nessus 4 use less memory, its shorter scan times reduces processing time.
- Nessus 4 is ten times faster than Nessus 2.
Of course, every network is different and quantifying performance for a network scanner is not an easy task. While we found the performance gap to be quite significant in our testing, results may not be typical in your environment - your mileage may vary. In particular, slow web server scan targets and increased network latency will limit any performance improvement. You are encouraged to share your experience about performance on the Nessus Discussion Portal.
Today there are more than 25600 plugins covering 10160 unique CVE IDs and 7073 Bugtraq IDs available to Nessus HomeFeed and ProfessionalFeed users. We expect this number to keep growing and are confident that Nessus will remain the premier scanning solution for performing network scanning, patch auditing and configuration testing of desktops, servers, databases and network devices.
