Speed issue again

[yildi]

Hi all,

I am using the latest version of Avast over a French Windows XP Home. I have signalled before my impression that Avast has begun to slow down my computer at one point in time (maybe a new version of Avast or the higher number of programs on my computer is responsable of this...). Now I have the proof (not numerical, of course :-(   ). I have disabled the Standard Shield and the startup of my computer and my software have dramatically changed. I have found the performances I have totally forgotten in the last months.... I have a Pentium 4 2GB system with 512Mb of Ram. I have defragmented the registry and my hard disk and the paging file in the past but the performance increase I get when I disable the Standard shield, is tremendously higher than from the one I get through these tricks.

This is of course very frustrating because when I have installed Avast some months ago, I have not noticed at all any negative speed effect...

Any idea about the reason of this effect: too many softs? too many Windows updates? new versions of Avast?

Best wishes to you all in the new year!

MY

[Vlk]

This is quite strange... your hardware is OK and so the is the OS so I'm really not sure what's going on here...

What is the sensitivity of the Standard Shield? It may be worth trying to play with Standard Shield's settings a bit... Especially it would be useful to find out which options have negative impact on performance... To access Standard Shield's settings, double-click the avast tray icon (the blue ball), click 'Details >>' and double-click the Standard Shield provider's icon in the list on the left...

Sorry that I cannot be of greater help right now...

Thanks
Vlk

[yildi]

This is already a path to explore. Thank you for your suggestion, I will check it. I have the impression that the bottleneck is maximal when I launch a program and when I browse a folder in my file manager called PowerDesk. I will check dfferent functions of the standard shield... and will inform you about the results of my experiements  

[yildi]

I have already done experiments with some programs particularly slow to launch and memory-hungy. I have a established an ordered cycle composed of:
1/ Scientific WorkPlace 5 (SWP)
2/Dreamweaver 4  (DW)
3/ Image Styler (IS)
4/ Home Site 5  (HS)
5/ Gimp             (GP)
6/ StarOffice 6   (SO)

I have first launched this cycle several times in order to fill the cacahe with them. Then I launched this cycle in three configurations in the following order: 1. Standard Shield paused (Pause), 2. Normal protection (Normal) and 3. High Protection (High). I have done this several times and here the averages:

Soft          Pause     Normal      High
SWP          9:43         12:86      13:09
DW           11:66        15:49      15:34
IS             13:85        16:57      16:58
GP            16:37        17:95      18:01
SO            10:87        11:52      11:65

These results show that the deadweight happens mainly in the activation of Avast (the High protection has a small cost in itself). More than these numbers, I can assure you that the reactivity of my computer is very different between the first config and the others (even the toolbar buttons remain clicked for a small amount of time in these configurations and the resfreshing of a folder takes much more time).  I have the impression that the bottlenecks are in the displaying of the UI (refreshing folders, using toolbars, showing toolbars...

What are the more relevant parameters that you want me explore? I can go to the custom mode and test them.

MY

[Vlk]

Thanks for your time. Are you saying that pausing the shield actually does the trick? So now it'd be quite useful to find out which settings are the biggest bottlenecks, as pausing the provider is equivalent to turning all the switches off.

Anyway the numbers you've given seem quite reasonable to me... Morover, under XP avast uses intelligent 'caching' of scanned files so that it tries not to rescan files it has already scanned (provided they haven't changed)...

Another Q: what is the 'number of files scanned' field for the Standard Shield now showing?

And I shouldn't forget to add - I hope you're using the latest version of avast, 4.1.319...

Thanks
Vlk

[yildi]

I do not have now time to check individual features but I will do it later.

I aggree with you that the numbers do not look awfull but the general feeling can really be: sometime I must wait a lot in order to see a folder to refreh itself :-(

Yes, I use this version of Avast and the shield tells that it has scanned 1458 files.

I haven't knew about the caching but this explains while these performances are so good. In my first tests (after having run some rounds of the cycle with the shield disabled, for filling the Windows cache with these files - I ma trying to be honest to Avast ;-)   ) I have seen a much higher deadweight loss when I have activated the Normal shield : IS was taking 34:24 to launch for example ans HS 32:03. But I have eliminating these data when I have seen that in the following runs the numbers were lower. Your information tells me that these are the relevant numbers....  I assure you, the global feeling of my computer is very different between PAUSE and NORMAL....

Best regards,

MY