New Avast - install it or wait ?

[janmatejko]

Hi, im still using ver. 8. My pc is a bit old and i have winxp-which suits me well.
And i've read about problems with new version (they are going bigger and slower every time). I see some unanwsered topics in local (polish) part of forum.
im not using restore ponit in windows so i would be very angry if something will go wrong with update

So what to do ?
stick with ver 8, risk with 9, or move to AVG ? (free version)

looooooooong time avast user

[CraigB]

If your not using restore points the you can make a system image with something like Macrium Reflect which is far better than restore anyway, then install avast and test it for yourself and if you don't like it you can restore the image.

[Alikhan]

At this moment of time, I'd agree that it's best to stay with v8. There's many bugs yet and some are annoying (such as the VPS ad bug). So stick with 8 for a while longer until the bugs are ironed out..

[janmatejko]

ty

[lukas.hasik]

At this moment of time, I'd agree that it's best to stay with v8. There's many bugs yet and some are annoying (such as the VPS ad bug). So stick with 8 for a while longer until the bugs are ironed out..

Alikhan, we are not aware of any important bugs in avast 2014 R2 release (9.0.2011). Any reports of such issues are welcome.
Of course, it's a software therefore there are always some bugs however we are talking about bugs that affect important functionality or wide audience...

[Alikhan]

At this moment of time, I'd agree that it's best to stay with v8. There's many bugs yet and some are annoying (such as the VPS ad bug). So stick with 8 for a while longer until the bugs are ironed out..

Alikhan, we are not aware of any important bugs in avast 2014 R2 release (9.0.2011). Any reports of such issues are welcome.
Of course, it's a software therefore there are always some bugs however we are talking about bugs that affect important functionality or wide audience...

I would agree that most of the bugs don't affect important functionality but the most irritating fact is that when the bugs are reported on the forum/feedback, there's no response from avast! at all.

For example, not receiving the VPS notifications was reported as a bug at BETA3, no one has commented on it.

The current release stops Outlook 2010 from receiving/sending emails.

The firewall is still not fully compatible with Java sites. I understand that it's been recoded but it puts alot of users off.

Since the new transparent proxy has come in, a lot of people can't browse the web. Not everyone is capable enough of fixing the issue. I've seen several people who can't browse the web due to it.

The paid version has got ads in it... seems like a cheap marketing trick. I'd understand in the free versions but the paid I think is unacceptable.

In this version, the RAM usage has gone very high.. it seems like there's a memory leak. It has gone up to 140mb idle. I know that it's still low on the CPU and I/O read but a jump from an average of 10 to 140 doesn't seem right...

The AOS plugin still has problems. Makes web browsing slow and in some cases impossible in Firefox and IE11. I don't even need to go into more depth with that.

Since the release of v9, the amount of false positives have increased significantly.

There's been a lot of errors with "offline" installations NOT working and the "online" installer working.. there's been no response of that. I myself have 3 laptops which don't install using the offline installer but work during the "online" installer. I suppose this has to do with the SFX.

Version 9.0.2011 causes videos to lag/stutter on Youtube while using the transparent proxy, reverting, fixes it. On some occasions, it would block the videos completely. Again, by disabling Avast, the issues were fixed.

I'd agree that the majority of the bugs would be fixed by a clean install but many novice users wouldn't know that.  Even a simple "we're aware of the issue" or "fixing it" would let the users know. A lot of these issues have been spread around on the forum in several topics/posts. To end with a positive v9.0.2011 has fixed alot of the bugs but still there's room for improvement.

[lukor]

In this version, the RAM usage has gone very high.. it seems like there's a memory leak. It has gone up to 140mb idle. I know that it's still low on the CPU and I/O read but a jump from an average of 10 to 140 doesn't seem right...

From what I know about this there is a tradeoff between disk writes (swapping) and memory usage. For most of our users out there, the disk IO is much slower than memory, therefore swapping between physical memory and pagefile is a very noticeable slow down. Some of the swapping code was removed from avast recently.


Is your system low on free memory? Of course if the system does not have memory to load other apps, it must swap on its own, but until that point everything that stays in a memory and does not need to be swapped onto the disk is a performance benefit. As a user I like to feel that more memory buys me more speed - which is possible only when the memory is not unused :-)


If there was a memory leak, that would be a different story, this is wasted memory and must be fixed - but I am not sure if leaked memory allocations would still be in a "working set" and be counted in that task manager column.

[Para-Noid]

With all due respect, I have found the latest (2011) to be quite stable.
With 200,000,000 users worldwide there will always be someone with an issue.
Keep in mind that's 200,000,000 different set-ups presenting a lot of possible issues.

What you see posted on the forums are the teeny, tiny, minute percentage who
encounter issues. The huge, vast majority rarely post simply because they have no
need to post, unless they want to praise avast for such a powerful anti-virus.

IMHO I see no reason to "not" update to this version.

@ Alikhan  Not "every" user have had "every" issue you listed.

[Alikhan]

I never stated I had all these issues, I was just mentioning some. The fact remains that there was no "official" response if the issues were known or not. Some of the bugs mentioned have been there since the early BETA stages.

@ Lukor I haven't experienced any slow downs of any nature. I have plenty of RAM. It was just that the jump was high between versions which makes it seem like there is a leak. Lukas himself asked for a process dump too, here's just 1 post regarding it.

http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=142936.msg1038224#msg1038224

[Para-Noid]

Just because there was/is no "official" does not indicate avast is "not" monitoring the forums and/or the feedback board.
Not everyone has the exact same issue. Most issues are fixed via a regular vps update without the need for avast to
even acknowledge a specific issue. 

[NoelC]

With all due respect, this version IS a good bit buggier than its predecessors, as well as more difficult to use because of what appears to be a more or less random approach to reorganizing the UI.

Authors and folks not noticing problems might tend to assign the fault of instability to the folks running sloppy OS setups.  I suppose that's reasonable, given most peoples' systems are a mess of installed toolbars, crapware, and registry cleaners, but rest assured Windows experts who actually know what they're doing and manage their systems very well are seeing problems.

• I've never had a case before (since many years ago when I first started running Avast! with XP x64) where Avast settings changes would not stick - but now I'm in that very situation.  I'm about to try a "Repair" operation to see if that helps.
• I've never had an update fail to go in, but an attempt to update yesterday got stuck.
• Now the product puts up ads all the time.
• I've had a large number of "false positives" lately - something I virtually NEVER had to worry about before.  It interfered with my software development until I excluded a whole section of my development environment.
• Navigating the current Windows 8-inspired UI borders on ridiculous.  There are settings spread all over in multiple different places, with no window borders, some resizable dialogs and some not, large blocks of useless whitespace...

-Noel

[lukor]

@ Lukor I haven't experienced any slow downs of any nature. I have plenty of RAM. It was just that the jump was high between versions which makes it seem like there is a leak. Lukas himself asked for a process dump too, here's just 1 post regarding it.

http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=142936.msg1038224#msg1038224

Alikhan, I know about these posts and we are looking at this. It can of course be a sign of a problem, inefficiency of some sort or a memory leak. I hope for none of this, but in case it is we'll try to fix it.


Just wanted to post a different view on the subject. An example might be the recent optimization efforts inside WebShield. When scanning in WebShield we have to use some memory, the scanning of every byte takes some time, if you are downloading over 1gbit network, there is a lot of data, more than a average disk can provide you - if we don't have memory buffers to store the data before they can be scanned, we have to slow down the download.


This is basically something you never want to happen. More memory generally means more speed it this situation. Yet it is somewhat hard to find out what is "too much" and what is "still acceptable", since we are aware of the fact that users want their memory for other tasks. What we do here is that we allocate more for the network buffers in case there is more memory available in the system.

Of course, when the PC is idle, we don't need many buffers and the memory consumption should/might go down. Especially if you don't mind waiting for the disk as soon as you start using your PC again. Some users don't mind and prefer to see avast with small "working set" and some do and want a quick response from the system, even when coming from idle state.


Recently I have installed a disk driver software from SSD manufacturer that boosted my disk speed to doubles! Very nice. It eats loads of memory, but overall the system is faster so I don't mind, I am happy.


On the other hand, if a software (say Avast) would have a negative performance impact on a system, more than users would like to accept for the security, that's really bad and we would have to solve it even if the "Working set" memory column would be close to zeros.

[Alikhan]

Yeah, I'd agree with that statement. When browsing/downloading etc it's bound to go up. My point was directed to idleness, it just doesn't go down and actually "increases" during idle time.