If you look at where all that space is being primarily used it is the definitions folder, over 600MB. The second biggest folder is the Setup one at about 370MB.
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...The total size of the AVAST installation footprint has doubled in that time. The definitions folder is the culprit vastly increasing in size over three times.
I'd be interested to know why.
A program just under 1GB can be accommodated on most modern devices but and when you're using a 120GB SSD as your primary drive, common in mid-priced desktops, then it is still a significant amount of space.
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Well, I'd blame the malware writers for the increase in definition folder size. Avast version 5, as I remember, covered around 3,000,000 + definitions and that was more than a few years ago. Current version, 17.4, has almost 6.5 million definitions, and a feature of the definitions table is that every known definition will cover related definitions (up to 100 or so) but are not hard-coded in the database. The tasks and areas to cover have also grown over time. For example, version 5 introduced streaming updates but did not cover ransomware and so on.
There also was an effort to reduce the number of covered definitions by avast shortly after version 5 was brought out.
Increase in size is due to Avast doing it's job. Lucky for us, drive capacity has kept pace.
