Avast WEBforum
Consumer Products => Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security (legacy Pro Antivirus, Internet Security, Premier) => Topic started by: lister on July 21, 2005, 03:51:29 PM
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I noticed my PC taking a longer time to startup recently.
After a bit of investigation, it seems that avast! is scanning most of the executables in my Program Files folder (nearly 500).
and often scans *.EXEs that are not active (not in startup nor running).
any ideas?
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Snap, whilst avast scans files that are loaded on boot to ensure you are protected as early as possible I have the same situation with many programs that rarely see the light of day from one week to the next.
My theory, but not confirmed or denied by Alwil is the items in my start menu all have icons displayed and in order to display these icons they have to extracted from the .exe file (I believe) and this would activate an avast scan.
You may well have more programs in your program files folder than me (I have two folders for programs), although not all the exe files are scanned (D:) 276 in one and (C:) 166 in the other
However, my total is now greatly reduced it used to be 800+ much of this activity and related avast scans are generated by my firewall, now that I have disabled that completely (I run a batch file to start it after boot) my scanned total is in the 300+ range.
http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=14062.0
There are however, a number of files in my program files folders which are scanned for no apparent reason (other than my theory above).
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So no one else has any thoughts why avast should be scanning all these executables at startup?
It didn't use to be so (it started a couple of weeks ago, maybe less), but now it adds nearly a minute until avast completes and I can start using my PC.
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Full boot up after entering my password takes ~1 minute on my system too but I'm not really concerned as my PC is not the latest one so it's ussual. ;) look below, maybe your system configuration is almost the same as mine... ;D
Correction: I was wrong as it takes ~3 minutes. checked with stopwatch. ;D
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PC, XP Pro SP2, 1GB ram, 2.66ghz p4.
My laptop with win2k, 512 ram, 2.8 ghz Celeron starts up faster, it should be much slower!
They both have the exact same startup progs, but the avast on the laptop only scans 50 or processes or less on startup - as I mentioned, avast! scans over 500 processes on startup, on the PC!
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Are the resident protection advanced settings exactly the same on both computers? ???
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Both set to high.
Standard shield, P2P, Mail, script blocking and Webshield active.
ZoneAlarm Pro on both (4.5**), and the transparent proxy for the webshield is disabled.
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I'm not sure it is possible to compare these systems for obvious reasons.
1. Different Operating Systems.
2. There will obviously be different drivers etc between the Laptop and Desktop systems.
However, this difference seems to big even for different OS and platform, but only 50 scanned files (not processes) after boot seems wrong to me. Many dlls are loaded by various processes at startup and I would have thought that this must be more than fifty.
I believe my system is fairly tight on allowing processes to start and I have 28 running processes in task manager after boot and I feel that each of those would spawn or access at least 1 dll, etc.
I exhausted most of my possible reasons in the thread I created (link in my first post 'Reply #1') and received no real explanation as to what types of file are scanned on startup outside of those that run or are accessed by other programs and are subsequently scanned by avast. Or does avast check the registry for program associations or something else regardless of the fact these programs aren't run on boot.
So I too am awaiting an answer in simple terms from Alwil, what files does avast scan on boot and why?
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I think I've fixed my slow startup, a case of overtweaking (avast! is still scanning near 500 files/processes etc) but I don't think that was the cause.
A while ago, I got in the nasty (& pointless) habit of deleting folder contents with a little prog a friend wrote. Fine, it did empty some useless log files etc, but also deleted the contents of my prefetch folder.
With Task manager disabled, the prefetch folder will stay empty - no layout.ini, no prefetching. There is absolutely no need to empty the prefetch folder
Anyway, enabled TM again, recreated the layout.ini and after a few reboots, XP is back to normal!
Hope you get your problems sorted Dave! and Thanks for replying!
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Well I have Task Manager enabled but pre fetch is not enabled, in fact I don't have a pre-fetch folder if I remember rightly
However my scanned total is down to around 300 with Outpost Pro disabled on startup and as a service (started manualy with a batch file after boot). So no real delay compared to before.
I will check to see if layout.ini exists and create a pre fetch folder and see if this makes any difference.
What is your scanned count after boot now?
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About 470 (ish). Enabling prefetching knocked nearly a min off of startup (after a few reboots). XP starts in about 40 seconds now.
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XP starts in about 40 seconds now.
How long it takes before you have the prefetch feature enabled?
Is it ok now (I mean, waiting only 40 seconds to boot)?
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It didn't start to boot normally until after the 3rd boot. I'm assumnig this is for the prefetch file to be generated.
From power on, XP takes 40-50 seconds to all progs loaded and ready (have to enter my pass, so you could take a couple of secs off that).
Before, with no prefetch, it was taking a minute more.
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I'm assumnig this is for the prefetch file to be generated.
Edited... I was wrong. See lister's link posted here.
Sorry.
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Assuming the prefetch speeds up the loading of programs that you use often, how is that accomplished if the prefetch is created on the First run of any program, is the *.pf 'reinforced' in subsequent runs?
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actually, found this
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/sysperf/benchmark.mspx
Boot Prefetching
Windows XP speeds up system boot by observing the code and data needed each time the system is booted and prefetching the necessary file contents early in the boot process. This prefetching is not done until the third boot of the system, when sufficient information is available to make the prefetching most effective. The files observed during system boot will be used in the disk layout process mentioned above. Additional information on the prefetcher and the Windows XP boot process can be found at Fast Boot/Fast Resume for the Windows Platform.
Application-Launch Prefetching
Windows XP also uses prefetching when launching applications. The files and the contents of the files accessed by each new process are observed and recorded. No prefetching can be done for the first launch of an application, so first launches are often considerably slower than subsequent launches. About 85% to 90% of the improvement is realized after just one launch of an application, with the remaining speed improvement coming after the system has had an opportunity to adjust the disk layout with information specific to this application.
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I recreated my Prefetch folder and layout.ini file (did do 3 reboots and opened the programs I use regularly, etc. to get them in to prefetch) now my scanned total has increased by about 50, not decreased as it now scans the .pf files as they are accessed. There are currently 5+ .pf files and layout.ini in the prefetch folder.
No noticeable difference on boot times, but my system has many default processes that aren't required disabled. However, haven't timed or run bootvis to see for certain if the boot times are improved.