Sorry to bring up an old thread, but using AVAST! on OS X and the results are less than pleasing. I've encountered massive system resource hogging (where the AVAST! processes were using 100% CPU). Other than that, AVAST! had been good up until a few days ago, where I am now nothing the Chrome slow down (haven't really tested other browsers, not really interested in doing so).
I tried to remove the files in /private/var/db/crls, using rm -rf * (whilst in the directory) and I'm noticing some weird behaviour from the shell, that I've never noticed in any other UNIX like system. Whilst in the directory, I cannot remove the files, I get permission denied. I traverse up a level in the file system heirachy and retry and this time I don't get an error, but the files are still there, untouched. I guess this is because AVAST! is still running, see the paragraph below. edit: figured out why it wasn't removing, it seems that OS X doesn't consider su by default, even though I swear I've used it multiple times before. mmm. sudo did the job. I personally dislike sudo (which is why I refuse to use Ubuntu).
I quit the AVAST! application (AVAST ==> quit) but the processes are still running in the background. Obviously it hasn't done what I asked it to do. So, how do I turn AVAST! fully off on the OS X system? If I ask an application to quit, it should quit.
I've also checked out the
http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=97074.0 thread, there's nothing suspicious in terms of PIDs using CPU that might be considered to be triggering the AVAST - I haven't paid attention to which AVAST application was using all the CPU, but will note it next time that it happens.
I'm running 10.6.8, 4GB ram. Chrome Version 27.0.1453.93.
I know it's free, but crikey, I can't recommend it based on performance so far.
Dave
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Avast seems to proxy Web and Email traffic (assuming that's enabled)
One of the things that I notices is opscd becoming quite taxed after installation of Avast. Using Outlook/SSL to company Exchange server, along with general web browsing was sluggish and the application process would become unresponsive.
Disabling Avast would seem to make the problem go away, so immediately blame that.
However, after a bit of inspection I found two other shims in my case that caused issues.
1] opscd, the CRL database in /private/var/db/crls had some entries with dead TTL that Avast simply didn't seem to know what to do with. Therefore opscd would see the TTL expired and would try to interogate a CA, which Avast would intercept and simply cause a race condition (because the TTL was dead, invalid, bad hash, etc)
If you're slow, trying making a backup of /private/var/db/crls, and then remove ALL of the entries (not just the .db entries)
(sudo rm -rf /private/var/db/crls/* && sudo rm -rf /private/var/db/crls/.fl*)
2] Cisco Anyconnect, or Legacy Cisco VPN client. In OSX 10.6 or better, where users upgraded from Leopard to Lion. Artifacts from previous 32 bit apps may hang around. One of which is the VPNd process shim from Cisco. Assuming you have/had this installed, I would suggest you uninstall by running the Cisco uninstall script. (sudo /opt/cisco/vpn/bin/vpn_uninstall.sh)
As always, make a backup before you make these changes/execute at your own risk/etc.
If you're web related performance issues with Avast, hope this helps point some people in the right direction.
- Tom
