CPU time has REALLY spiked

[CimbaSolutions]

I've been using Avast! Home for about six months now, and I've been very happy with it.  Over the last couple of days, the amount of CPU time the ashServ.exe process is using on my Windows XP machine has gone up considerably. 

This morning, it was hovering around the 85% range, and the PC is pretty much useless at that point.  Sometimes a reboot takes care of it, sometimes not.

Any ideas?   

[DavidR]

Is the avast icon rotating?
Have you installed anything new that may be generating activity, which avast will scan?
Try switching on the 'Show detailed info on performed action' in standard sheld to see what is being scanned.

[CimbaSolutions]

Yes, the tray icon is rotating.  The only thing that's been installed in the last few days since this started happening was the WMF fix for Windows - no applications have been installed.

When I turn on the detailed scan information, it doesn't show anything, and it's spiking at 92%.

[CimbaSolutions]

It looks like it's the Instant Messaging provider.  If I go through and pause the providers individually, that's the only one that causes the CPU time to drop back down to where it used to be.

Is this something that I'll need to re-install to fix, or is there something else I can do?

[DavidR]

I doubt that the WMF fix would be the cause, otherwise many more people would be reporting this problem.
How regular an occurrence is this?
What are you doing when the spikes occur?

I was going to suggest that you tick the show detailed info on performed actions for other providers that may have an effect. However, I would have thought the spike would have been recorded against the provider, unless in this instance the IM provider CPU activity is shown in the main ashServ.exe process (I don't use IM so this is a guess). Even so the icon should also rotate. Do you have avast scan the downloaded content using ashQuick.exe?

Try a repair of avast. Add Remove programs, select 'avast! Anti-Virus,' click the Change/Remove button and scroll down to Repair, click next and follow. You need to be on-line to do this.
If that doesn't work try, uninstall, reboot, install, reboot.
It would probably be best to download the latest version of avast and save it to your HDD, somewhere you can find it again. Use that when you reinstall.

[CimbaSolutions]

I think I've found the problem.  I use Trillian for my IM client, and based on some of the posts I saw on the Trillian Forums about high CPU utilization (not related to avast, mind you, just in general).  People there seemed to get rid of that issue by cleaning out their chat logs.  Seems there can be issues with performance if any of the conversation log files are quite large.

Some of mine were large, so I stopped Trillian, cleaned them all out, restarted Trillian, and restarted the Instant Messaging provider.  It seems OK now, but I'll will keep an eye on it to make sure it stays that way.

Thanks for your help DavidR!

[DavidR]

No problem, we both learned something. You can either clear your logs regularly or you could exclude the trillian log file, assuming it is just a text based file and no risk.

Welcome to the forums

[Staind]

Trillian creates a lot of log files (both chat history, ID names, and the changes to people's avatars).   I would recommend clearing the log area atleast once a month or Trillian becomes a bit bloated while having conservations.