Author Topic: Avast 4.6.652 Email Problem  (Read 42236 times)

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Offline lukor

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Re: Avast 4.6.652 Email Problem
« Reply #30 on: May 17, 2005, 09:41:58 AM »
Lukas,

your comment is somewhat disengenuous if you read the thread.  He wanted to conduct a test with Avast not intercepting the traffic, I told him how to do this and I made it very clear that this was a method of not intercepting SMTP traffic. 

Perhaps you can come back and advise us of the team's finding on the basic point of this thread ...  that this user has identified a performance flaw in the way Avast transmits the SMTP traffic after scanning the data.

Will you also confirm (truth in advertising) that selecting the "do not scan outgoing messages" does not stop Avast from intercepting the traffic on the port specified or defaulted in SMTP in the Redirects tab?

Sorry, perhaps I did not understood it correctly. I though this is being offered a solution to speed the whole process not as a diagnostic measure.

Anyway, unchecking the checkbox "Scan outbound mail" on SMTP tab has exactly the same effect - it does stop avast from intercepting the traffic on the particular port completely. Slightly different behavior is in WebShield, when with unchecked "Enable Web Scanning" checkbox it still redirects the traffic and may do the page blocking if configured.

Offline lukor

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Re: Avast 4.6.652 Email Problem
« Reply #31 on: May 17, 2005, 09:52:29 AM »
Lukas,

your comment is somewhat disengenuous if you read the thread.  He wanted to conduct a test with Avast not intercepting the traffic, I told him how to do this and I made it very clear that this was a method of not intercepting SMTP traffic. 


Don't want to argue but from this:

Quote from: hgratt
O.K, I did as you suggested and it worked - no real difference between having outbound scanning enabled or disabled - speeds are still somewhat slower than they should be 75-80KBS vs. 90-92KBS. Still not sure why - maybe an Internet issue, we'll see tomorrow.

Could you explain the port change that you gave - why does it work? Any negative issues?

one can think that hgratt is not entirely aware of the fact, that turning outbond scanning on or off with the changed redirected port makes no real difference since it is (for all practical considerations) turned OFF completely.


Offline alanrf

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Re: Avast 4.6.652 Email Problem
« Reply #32 on: May 17, 2005, 10:11:23 AM »
Lukas,

you are the professional and I but the humble user and, honestly, it saddens me to disagree with you here. 

However , I just clicked off the "scan outgoing mail" and I monitored the file activity in the the temporary Avast folder.

Avast created exactly the same temporary file and read exactly the same temporary file as when I had "scan outgoing mail" selected for exactly the same message as I reported earlier in this thread.     

Now please tell me again that it does not intercept the traffic.

Offline lukor

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Re: Avast 4.6.652 Email Problem
« Reply #33 on: May 17, 2005, 10:22:31 AM »
Alan,
the redirected port is unregistered when the outbound scanning is turned off. The service remains running but it stops to listen on that specific TCP port on localhost (12025 in this case). You can verify this but running netstat -a or TCPView.

Offline alanrf

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Re: Avast 4.6.652 Email Problem
« Reply #34 on: May 17, 2005, 10:29:45 AM »
Perhaps a concession is in order that we may both be correct in a way.

I have just conducted the test again.

When I click off the "scan outgoing mail" then port 12025 ceases to be listening. 

It does not remove the intercept on port 25.

If I then terminate and start (again) the Internet Mail Provider then following the restart there is no intercept on port 25 and the temporary files associated with intercepted mail are not created.   

Offline alanrf

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Re: Avast 4.6.652 Email Problem
« Reply #35 on: May 17, 2005, 10:59:19 AM »
I will happily agree that de-selecting the "scan outbound mail" option will stop intercepting the SMTP stream (ok - I admit I do think it should be with the proviso "but stop and restart the provider" to be sure). 

However, I do hope that the team will give serious attention to the points raised on the efficiency of the onward transmission of the scanned SMTP stream.

with respect and thanks to Lukas and all other participants,
 
Alan

who will now (try to) leave this one up to the Avast team.

Offline lukor

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Re: Avast 4.6.652 Email Problem
« Reply #36 on: May 17, 2005, 12:44:53 PM »
I made some tests on our connection, sending 5,6MB mail with PDF attachment.

Avast disabled: 4 s
Avast enabled: 7 s

It is no doubtly a slowdown, but the times are so small I don't this this is a percentual slowdown of 75%. However Vojtech is aware of this thread, perhaps he'll be able to detect some performance issues in the code.

Lukas.

Offline alanrf

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Re: Avast 4.6.652 Email Problem
« Reply #37 on: May 17, 2005, 01:13:50 PM »
Lukas,

with your connections - who needs to worry about performance?

(Except for us poor folks).

Thanks for the update.


Offline lukor

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Re: Avast 4.6.652 Email Problem
« Reply #38 on: May 17, 2005, 01:58:36 PM »
Lukas,

with your connections - who needs to worry about performance?

(Except for us poor folks).
Thanks for the update.


On contrary. If there is a performance problem, it would appear on high speed networks more loudly. On dial-up even poorly written server is capable of serving data at 5kb/s, however serving at 100 Mbps is a completely different story.

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Re: Avast 4.6.652 Email Problem
« Reply #39 on: May 17, 2005, 06:13:42 PM »
O.K, I did some more testing using a stop watch to verify the speeds that NetPerSec  was reporting. NetPerSec IS reporting the correct speeds - transmitted file size was about 2.2 MB.

Based on input from this thread, I have compared 3 scenarios (all standard ports are enabled):

1. Avast uninstalled -  I pretty much get my full upload speeds (90-92KBS), 24 seconds

2. Avast installed, outbound scanning on - about 40KBS, 59 seconds

3. Avast installed, outbound scanning off - about 81-83KBS, 27 seconds

FWIW, NAV always gave me the 90-92KBS speeds after it scanned any attached files.

So again, as indicated in this thread, is this a significant performance problem and if so, how long does it typically take to get something like this fixed?

Thanks,
Harvey

Offline DavidR

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Re: Avast 4.6.652 Email Problem
« Reply #40 on: May 17, 2005, 06:42:32 PM »
Quote
FWIW, NAV always gave me the 90-92KBS speeds after it scanned any attached files.
The only problem I see with this statement is can you be sure that NAV and avast is scanning to the same level and method of scan/transmission, e.g. does NAV use a transparent proxy/localhost for scanning email and if it is a PDF attachment say, does NAV fully scan pdfs as there is a perception that pdfs are safe (if you only have the reader installed)?

I'm not sure what levels avast goes to in various attachment types but to make a comparison between avast and NAV they would need to be the same!
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Offline lukor

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Re: Avast 4.6.652 Email Problem
« Reply #41 on: May 17, 2005, 06:48:31 PM »
Hgratt, by the way what is your mail client?

Offline alanrf

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Re: Avast 4.6.652 Email Problem
« Reply #42 on: May 17, 2005, 09:21:51 PM »
It seems to me pretty clear that the issue here is not one of scanning at all.

As I tried to make clear in an earlier post:

Scanning and onward transmission of my test message took 151 seconds when going outbound to the network.

The message just sent out was immediately read back in.

Scanning and onward transmission of my test message took 5 seconds when going inbound to the mail client.

I have to assume the same scanning of the same message is performed inbound and outbound. 

I believe Avast significantly changes the way the transmission is handled (number of blocks sent/blocksize).  That will not matter too much inbound where it is all internal to the machine but will cause delays in the onward transmission outbound.

hgratt

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Re: Avast 4.6.652 Email Problem
« Reply #43 on: May 17, 2005, 09:32:40 PM »
Hgratt, by the way what is your mail client?

I'm using the Mozilla Suite (1.7.8).

Another data point. I have a win98se machine (latest patches) which gives the same upload speed whether or not scanning is enabled (only get about 75KBS, not 90KBS). However, the redirect tab stuff is greyed out, so I'm assuming that no outbound scanning is done in win98se. Is this correct?

Thanks,
Harvey

Offline lukor

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Re: Avast 4.6.652 Email Problem
« Reply #44 on: May 17, 2005, 10:11:58 PM »
Hgratt, have you performed the test with ZoneAlarm completely disabled? (right click on the icon and choose exit)
Thanks.
L.