What happened to Avast! - time to complete a full virus scan increased by 113%

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Guess I could run a couple of extra scans with the 'Store data about scanned files in the persistent cache' option checked to see if that will eventually improve the performance. How do you recommend I set the 'Speed up scanning by using the persistent cache' option while doing this...checked or unchecked?

As for the 'Speed up scanning by reading files in the order they are stored on disk' I have that option checked. Not sure though how much benefit I'll have from that option using a very fast SSD disk.

I've also tried changing Scan priority to 'High' but haven't seen any difference doing so.

Really strange all this because as I've already said I've been using Avast for years and years and never as far as I can recall have I seen this problem before how the time to perform a full manual scan has doubled.

[bob3160]

"it's a very complex one taking weeks to setup so I don't take any chances."
Regular image backups would cut that time and offer the ultimate protection.
Remember that your AV doesn't protect you against hardware failure.

[DavidR]

@  WebMaximus
Since that is a default option, I would leave the 'Speed up scanning by using the persistent cache' option checked (enabled).

I have systems with HDD and SDD hard drives as the primary drive, but the way I see it with an SDD they are less prone to the hassles of location as in an HDD drive. But I can't see that hurting if it is enabled, after all SDD soft/firmware would be placing files to prevent/balance writes to the SDD. I also don't know how much impact TRIM would have in relation to that setting.

But this XP Pro system has HDD as the primary so I would probably get greater benefit from that option.

If you are running these scans at a time when you are using the system, it is going to be slightly hampered even if set to High priority. After all I thought that was the point of scheduling scans. That said some are reporting issues with scheduled scans starting as per the schedule.

I certainly feel a robust backup and recover strategy would be a better way to go.

[REDACTED]

"it's a very complex one taking weeks to setup so I don't take any chances."
Regular image backups would cut that time and offer the ultimate protection.
Remember that your AV doesn't protect you against hardware failure.

Let me assure you I'm well aware of that and I'm already using software to perform complete image backups and those image backups in turn are also backed up on a separate disk in another physical location from where my computer is but...

...imagine if a virus found its way into my system and I didn't know about it until I already had it in both my image backups as well as on my image backups backup disk...I do what I can to avoid that.

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I fully agree a robust DR strategy is mostly your safest and most convenient option but IMO that doesn't make a likewise robust AV strategy obsolete.

I do appreciate your input guys but what I really want to know is what I asked already in the subject line when I created my first post - what happened to Avast all of a sudden taking the double amount of time to complete a full manual scan.

[DavidR]

I'm just not seeing any real difference on my other XP Pro system with the latest avast free version. I whilst in the beta nor the latest released avast free version I ran a number of on-demand scans just for testing and I didn't see any major differences.

This is why I'm at a loss as to what might be the issue on your system.

Have you made any other changes to the default settings of the scans you have run  ?
If you have, perhaps Resetting Factory defaults in the avastUI > Troubleshooting

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Nope, haven't changed anything but upgrading to the latest version of Avast.

Here's what it looked like on the 10th of Feb before I started to see this problem.



And this is what it looked yesterday running the same type of full manual scan using the latest version of Avast.

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Happy to see the scanning time is now back to normal and again with the exact same settings in Avast and same amount of data so apparently something changed in Avast again but this time for the better.