serious BUG: Avast slows down Vista inhibiting the Superfetch

[rbeane]

but using the rudementary visual tools decribed.

Just to clarify this was a comment on my testing methodology not the tools!

[Lisandro]

When I click excel from the start menu it doesn't increment the scanned count or the last scanned fields.  The .lnk and .xlsx files are scanned when using a link off my quick launch bar on the task bar.  Using the last scanned and scan count as indication. So pretty sure...but using the rudementary visual tools decribed.  Hope it helps.

Well... living and learning... maybe some explanation from Vlk or Igor will help me understand...

[Dwarden]

truth is when i installed two exactly same notebooks one with XP Pro and one with Vista Home (both with Avast 4.7 then tested also 4.8beta)...

for some reason booting and working in XP was nearly twice as fast ... when i disabled avast! standard shield Vista was just bit slower

i'm sorry i not tested disable onread but it's hard to say what's reason ...

[rolloLG]

Evidence is that HD overworks with Avast Standard provider on Vista. It's not simply a matter of "speed" (that may vary depending on your powerful hardware and you might not notice). You have to watch and hear the HD.
With Avast running every action forces HD loadings, without it Superfetch of Vista works very well loading just a little bit from HD (and is also faster obviously).

The fact that's not been widely reported is beacuse:
1. Vista + Avast is not so frequent because a lot still have XP...
2. if you don't look and hear to your HD you won't "notice" the problem and will just say "Well, it's Vista that is slow, and the AV has a reasonable impact over it", that is wrong: it has a huge impact, but you don't mind at it and won't blame Avast but Vista which is new etc. etc.
You have to make the speed test with big applications or simply running Administrators tool in Vista (Event Viewer and Scheduled tasks for example). They will make HD overwork, always, instead of using Superfetch and loading faster and without HD noise at all (almost).

[rbeane]

In my experience with vista, that is the way vista is designed.  Ie. It will take advantage of idle time to do tasks.  There seems to be a lot more going on under the covers with vista vs. XP, hence the HD activity.  Supposedly SP1 is supposed to minimize some of this HD activity.  Have you watched the On access scanner detail of avast during the periods of HD activity to see what is being scanned or if the scan count is incremented?

[rolloLG]

In my experience with vista, that is the way vista is designed.  Ie. It will take advantage of idle time to do tasks.  There seems to be a lot more going on under the covers with vista vs. XP, hence the HD activity.  Supposedly SP1 is supposed to minimize some of this HD activity.  Have you watched the On access scanner detail of avast during the periods of HD activity to see what is being scanned or if the scan count is incremented?

I use Vista since march 07 and I know it quite well. The problem is Avast, not Vista. It doesn't matter what's scanning... yes, I've tested this.
Vista HD activity is very low after initial boot where Superfetch, ReadyBoost/ReadyBoot and other services load a lot of data from HD (with low priority). But just in the beginning. After they finish (and you completed Indexing on your computer) HD activity is very low, without Avast.

[rbeane]

I understand...I also have been using it since March 2007.  My indexer is always working because of Emails coming and being deleted as an example.  That said you have not answered the question of whether or not the on access scanner shows what is being scanned by Avast.

[rolloLG]

I understand...I also have been using it since March 2007.  My indexer is always working because of Emails coming and being deleted as an example.  That said you have not answered the question of whether or not the on access scanner shows what is being scanned by Avast.

For sure it shows what's scanning, nothing special to report (un-normal) in this area. I've been using Avast for 6 months before discovering this problem switching to another AV... Avast works without apparent problems or something wrong to report on Vista, except that it affects HD loadings a lot. That's why is also hard to convince authors to even see the problem...
I was (I thought) very happy of Avast

PS
Indexer in Vista is always working, but it won't cause hd overwork. I meant the first indexing: it takes almost an afternoon but after this you'll see something like

(Indicizzazione completata = indexing complete)
It has nothing to do with Avast problem forcing HD eccessive work...

[rbeane]

This post was about Avast inhibiting the superfetch.  While I don't know what you guys are specifically seeing (since the indexer dialog isn't informative.), my tests of the superfetch/caching function showed to me that avast was not scanning my applications after the first load.  While superfetch is supposed to keep track of applications commonly used and preload them (at least that is one description I read), I don't see avast scanning these.  Maybe vista's reliability and performance monitor can tell you what application is hitting your hard drive when its activity is excessive.  Maybe then this information would hint at what Avast may be doing on your computer.  In mine I do see ashserv.exe and ashdisp.exe reading the pagefile.sys.  I don't know if this is normal or if the exclusion is not working under standard shield.  Maybe it has to do with this.

[DavidR]

Check and see if there is an exclusion in Standard Shield, Customize, Advanced and see if c:\pagefile.sys is included, if not Add it to the list (see image).

Note in the image i have changed the c for a ? (wildcard character), that way if you have your pagefile.sys in more than one drive that will take care of that without having to have two entries.

[Solemn]

This post was about Avast inhibiting the superfetch.  While I don't know what you guys are specifically seeing (since the indexer dialog isn't informative.), my tests of the superfetch/caching function showed to me that avast was not scanning my applications after the first load.  While superfetch is supposed to keep track of applications commonly used and preload them (at least that is one description I read), I don't see avast scanning these.  Maybe vista's reliability and performance monitor can tell you what application is hitting your hard drive when its activity is excessive.  Maybe then this information would hint at what Avast may be doing on your computer.  In mine I do see ashserv.exe and ashdisp.exe reading the pagefile.sys.  I don't know if this is normal or if the exclusion is not working under standard shield.  Maybe it has to do with this.

Well I think it's a relatively hard issue to pinpoint because the symptoms of this range a bit further than some of the reports here which suggest that it isn't very simple.  I've actually made a pretty detailed post (located here: http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=33852.0 ) about my problems which seem to have some relation to this as well.  Now I'm not a master with deciphering what's going on in the superfetch, but I can say that disabling avast! has a significant impact on the read/writing length and intensity on my HDD upon start-up (as well as the other loading issues described in my older thread).

Check and see if there is an exclusion in Standard Shield, Customize, Advanced and see if c:\pagefile.sys is included, if not Add it to the list (see image).

Note in the image i have changed the c for a ? (wildcard character), that way if you have your pagefile.sys in more than one drive that will take care of that without having to have two entries.

Although I'm not sure if this post was addressed to everyone experiencing these problems or just the other person who said more relevant information, I've checked my own settings and found this to already be setup as intended.

Also for some further information, I've recently gotten SP1 on this rig and have found no notable changes to these symptoms and that again once I disable avast!'s protection the issues do go away.  For that reason it looks like that for the most part it isn't mainly a behaviour issue with Vista, but more or less one with avast! and how it handles the various components in Vista. Though I can be patient, this problem has been going on for a long time and has bothered/worried me a fair bit, so I'm hoping that this does get addressed soon.

[Vlk]

Anyone experiencing the issue, could you please try a small experiment?

N.B. this is for users of 32-bit Vista only.

Please download the updated Standard Shield driver from the following location
http://public.avast.com/~vlk/vista-lag/i386/aswMonFlt.sys
and place it to the \Windows\System32\Drivers folder (overwrite existing).

Then reboot the machine.

Does that make any difference?


Thanks
Vlk

[rbeane]

Solemn - Hopefully, the new driver will make a difference for you.  After reading your older post, I noticed you run Avast on High.  I run mine at normal and have noticed that setting it on high on an older XP machine rendered it painful performance wise.  Does changing that to normal make a difference? Just trying to figure out the differences.  I believe the excessive hard drive activity after startup could be superfetch doing its job of preloading applications that you use regularly, but maybe avast is causing that time to be longer than it should be.  Hope the driver works, because our systems can never be fast enough.  If Avast finds something in the code it will benefit us all.

[Lisandro]

Vlk, how can we benchmark the performance before and after the new driver?
I can test but I want to do it technically, not just an impression of better performance.

[cvsa]

Anyone experiencing the issue, could you please try a small experiment?

N.B. this is for users of 32-bit Vista only.

Please download the updated Standard Shield driver from the following location
http://public.avast.com/~vlk/vista-lag/i386/aswMonFlt.sys
and place it to the \Windows\System32\Drivers folder (overwrite existing).

Then reboot the machine.

Does that make any difference?


Thanks
Vlk

After first reboot, Webshield was not working anymore unable to load web pages !!! computer hangs etc...

I did stop the computer ther turn it on then it seems ok now..

looks a bit faster