This started a few months ago, when I started playing Diablo III.
Every now and then (approx. 15 minutes) in multiplayer and once in a week (single player) my game would FREEZE, for like 10 seconds (not responding) and then usually goes back to normal / I have to restart.
Now, I have no "heavy softwares" running on my mac while playing, and I always assumed it was a bug in Diablo III for Mac or maybe it was a GPU fault.
Guess what? A week ago I decided to use my iStat 3 to see if anything consumes CPU/Memory which leads to this problem, and by surprise, I saw com.Avast.MacAvast.Mad taking 100% CPU, killing everything including my game resources.
I dont know why it's usually occuring in multiplayer while i play with 3-4 players, but not in single.
When the game freeze i can go to my system and 100% of the time the com.Avast.MacAvast.Mad will be num.1 consumer in iStat- 100% CPU, after 10 seconds disaapear (goes back to normal CPU) and then what? Diablo III works again.
So, I don't want to say anything bad about avast because its a free product, and Avast for windows is doing a great job, but WTF..
Please give me an answer / something I know that can help in this situation, because although im not paying at the moment, I would want to pay for avast when it goes retail, but if this is the true face of avast for Mac i would just uninstall this and go to sophos.
note: this problem is almost since the game came out (may, 2012), I just always blamed my GPU/Diablo III.
I even thought about buying a new mac with better GPU just to make it stop freezing, tho my GPU can handle diablo III ok while in low specs.
Yours, very disappointed, avast user.
EDIT: Seems to get to 100% even when mac is resting (in desktop without any games/softwares running).
This was also happening alot while system is after clear format, when only avast and diablo iii are installed.
Hallo,
in general, we can suspect fileshield in this case - does it help when you turn fileshield off in Preferences? Next step would be to identify which particular file, part of the Diablo installation, is causing this performance-hungry processing - on demand scanning would reveal this (you will see which file is shown as currently processed, when the progress got stuck). Also, it might be the very next one (directories in hfsplus have alphabetical ordering of items, so it's easy to get a clue whit 2 potential files might be the culprits).
PS: We weren't able to reproduce this with Diablo 3 so far, that's why some additional steps at your side are necessary to help you.
Okay, I fixed this problem 2 days ago, and I've only seen your post now.
What I did was that:
1. find the cause of the problem -> Avast taking 99% of CPU, when it goes back to normal, game is working again.
2. then i knew it was avast, so i suspected it was avast file shield, because it was the only one on, so i closed it and tested it.
3. It worked! so i put the shield back on! its stuck again! i went to the shield preferences and added diablo 3 to the "white list" = WORK! File shield + Diablo 3 = WORKS!
I just added the Diablo 3 directory to the excluded list, so file shield won't scan it anymore.
P.S: i only use file shield, mail and web shields are deactivated due to many problems with little-snitch v3.
This is a major bug between avast and diablo iii, this wasn't happening with civ 5.
NOTE: When the problem occures:
Diablo 3 cause file shield to get to 99% CPU consumption for 15 seconds and sometimes its stuck like that, in the following events:
- Playing a multiplayer game, after 10-15 minutes, Diablo III will stuck almost every 2 minutes- usually happenes on heavy loads, like starting archon attack against ubers fight with 3 other players.
- Even in solo, it happenes, really rare, but! if you cause heavy loads, and you got some bad luck, you've got yourself a diablo 3 not responding!
I have studied this problem alot, this problem occures when playing with 3 players and the game has many modfications at the same time (like many files that download from battle.net servers OR one massive file (like 2GB or more that's being acceses/updated and causing avast to act crazy as its starting to scan it all over again, which makes avast to jump to 99%, i dont know if this is a bug or just massive data to scan, but this is wrong, and this is avast's fault.
FIX for everyone who doesn't have time to wait for a normal fix:
add diablo 3 directory to the white list from the preferences.
I just wonder what someone without some tenchinal idea would do in that case, i couldn't go online, it was 99.9% to stuck every 2 minutes, after this temporal solution, and 15 hours of gameplay, half of it online (ubers fight with 3 other players, massive loads and even archon) = 0 not respondings- the game is playable again.
Please FIX this, please, not for me, for other users, don't say "oh it's ok he found a way to fix that" cuz other people may not know how to fix that, and this is 100% avast fault.
P.S: Yesterday was one of the most best diablo 3 ever, i could FINALLY play with my friends, after avast killed my machine everytime i tried to access online, i almost bought a new pc, now i dont trust avast anymore..
sorry for the massive language, this is just so frustrating, and thank you for attempt to help.
