In the past few days I've noticed higher than normal RAM usage on my system. Checking with Sysinternals Process Explorer I have found that the only program running with higher than normal or higher than previous memory usage is AvastSvc.exe which is now using up to 2GB of the system RAM.
In the past, AvastSvc used very little RAM.
There hasn't been a program update for Avast Free since early April, and this problem did not start until this past week. I can't see any reason why it would have started using so much memory all of a sudden. My usual tools to free up memory when there appears to be an issue (restarting Windows, and if that fails running a full system shutdown and leaving the system off for at least 5 minutes, then restarting) made no difference. Even a after starting up after a full system shutdown and before launching any other programs except those few that I have set up for autostart, AvastSvc.exe is still using a huge amount of memory compared to what it should be.
Does anyone have any idea what might be causing this, or any way to fix it (yes, I will uninstall and reinstall Avast if I have to, but I'm hoping for a different solution and some explanation for why this behavior started)?
Thanks,
Drake