High disk usage with BigSur

[Dmitriy69]

Hey! I use the latest BigSur and the latest Avast Free Security. And I notices that the proxy component writes a lot of data on the disk. As I understand that is because of web shiled? Like it puts all files to the disk, then scans them, and only after all that it allows these files to be accessible by the system?
The proxy can do ~50GB per day easily.
Can I use RAM disk for such activity? Or can that behavior somehow be tuned?

[ondrej.kolacek]

Hello,
proxy process contains Web and Mail Shield components which process web and mail traffic. Data is usually stored to temporary files before they are scanned. Please note that if File Shield component is active, proxy should generally not scan files you are downloading, however identifying downloads is not always possible.

Saying this, 50gb daily is extremely high; in our tests, we differ in order(s) of magnitude. We will investigate this issue.

Kind regards,
Ondrej Kolacek

[Dmitriy69]

Hello,
proxy process contains Web and Mail Shield components which process web and mail traffic. Data is usually stored to temporary files before they are scanned. Please note that if File Shield component is active, proxy should generally not scan files you are downloading, however identifying downloads is not always possible.

Saying this, 50gb daily is extremely high; in our tests, we differ in order(s) of magnitude. We will investigate this issue.

Kind regards,
Ondrej Kolacek

It is connected to "scan secure connections" in my case. I have disabled that option for test and now I see almost no disk usage from avast components.

[msdonohoe]

I had the same thing happen to me.  I installed Big Sur last week.  After a few days, I started seeing applications not working and alerts that I was out of disk space (I had several hundred GB free before the Big Sur install).  I freed up about 80GB by doing some aggressive housekeeping and moving off some stuff to remote storage.  High disk usage immediately resumed.  I finally tracked it down the Application Support folder in the Library folder in my home directory.  After reviewing this post, I switched off "scan secure connections" in Avast.  High disk usage has stopped.
Pretty clear this is the culprit.  Now it would be good to receive a bug fix and find out how to reclaim the 100s of GB of consumed disk space.......

[Dmitriy69]

We will investigate this issue.

Kind regards,
Ondrej Kolacek

Any updates?

[ondrej.kolacek]

We will investigate this issue.

Kind regards,
Ondrej Kolacek

Any updates?

The disk usage should be significantly reduced for a while now.