CPU and memory hog, and overheating

[brzl frbr]

I prefer Avast for Mac to all other programs because of the email scanning and site ratings, but I've had to uninstall it for the fourth or fifth time. I have an 8.1 aluminum 20" iMac from mid-2008 and run OS X 10.6.8. Avast will run beautifully for a while, but eventually it will have several days in a row of eating 90%+ of the CPU cycles even running in the background, and the temperature of my computer may jump 20 degrees or more thanks to the high CPU usage. When it's running like this, inactive memory will expand over a few minutes until I have almost no free memory left.

I can understand the rise in CPU temp because of the heavy use of CPU cycles, but why does it do this running in the background? And why does it max out inactive memory?

My previous iMac died because of overheating, and I don't want to lose this one, so I've switched to another product for now. I'd like to switch back to Avast, but this recurring problem worries me.

[krahulik]

Hi,
thank you for letting us know. We are aware of performance issues we currently have on some computers with our scanning component. In the previous versions we have introduced a workaround to reduce an impact on users, however the real solution we are currently working on will unfortunatelly require important internal changes and thus take some time.

Martin

[Flarup]

Me too.
I have the avast helper taking up 11G virtual memory.
The computer became very slow, and not responsive, so in the end I had to reboot, but as soon as it started again then problems continued.
After running some time on startup the Mac stops with tree beeps of death.

Right now I have disabled the avast services and it seems to work. But this is really annoying.

[krahulik]

Hello,
  I'm sorry, we know that on certain computers this issue occures. Currently we are preparing a version 9, which should have the scanning daemon rewritten from the scratch.

Martin

[bgb]

I was looking for a new anti virus app after I purchased a new iMac (27 inch I7 with 16 gig of memory). After searching the web and and seeing the great reviews of Avast I downloaded and installed it.
I started a full scan of my HD but after about 10 minutes I saw that I had less than 1 gig of memory left. I am hoping that a new version of Avast will be out soon and I'll give it another try.