Author Topic: Avast! is now "slower than molasses" and reports false scan times!  (Read 39770 times)

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Offline alanrf

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Re: Avast! is now "slower than molasses" and reports false scan times!
« Reply #30 on: April 04, 2008, 01:43:07 AM »
I assume that you can also take a large folder full of thousands of say jpg files, exclude jpg and then compare an ashquick scan with a ashsimple quick scan.

What differences?


Offline DavidR

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Re: Avast! is now "slower than molasses" and reports false scan times!
« Reply #31 on: April 04, 2008, 01:50:48 AM »
Update, messed up went to get a drink at about 50% complete, still on c: drive and forgot about my avast-excludes folder with tools and when I came back up the alert pop-up was waiting for me, so that will screw with the scan duration.

The strange thing is after dealing with the alerts, the scan percentage seemed to have reset as when I next noticed it it was at 15%

I didn't notice any real difference in the speed the scan progressed through the folders previously mentioned or any of the comments I made.

Total Files/Folders scanned      39,692/3874  an increase of 35 files in 3 folders
Scan duration reported in SUI 19:53 my total 25 minutes.
Total scanned file size            29.3GB          an increase of 20.9 of drive images, 1GB pagefile.sys and 1.4MB

It didn't seem to take that long over the .v21 drive image files considering they average close to 2GB each and 20.9 GB worth. So I don't think that removing the exclusions had any positive impact. But because of the additional large increase in scanned size and my getting a drink, the result isn't quantifiable. Perhaps tomorrow.
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Offline DavidR

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Re: Avast! is now "slower than molasses" and reports false scan times!
« Reply #32 on: April 04, 2008, 02:19:57 PM »
OK, Ran it again directly after boot no exclusions, no archives:
files and folders   39683/3872
Run Time           19:30
Total scanned     28.3GB

Ran again with the following exclusions:
G:\drive-images\*  my back-up hard disk images 2GB file sizes, etc.
D:\avast-excludes\*  samples and tools that would otherwise be detected by avast.
This time I left out this mask ?:\pagefile.sys, even so it does seem that they were excluded by default.

files and folders   39647/3866
Run Time           15:48
Total scanned     7.3GB

So given the fact that the large drive image files weren't scanned the scan run time wasn't much different a little under 4 minutes, so I don't think the masks made that much difference.

Last night I did a context ashquick scan of my Drive Image folder 13 files, 20.9GB and after 10 minutes it had only done 4 of the files, so I gave up and went to bed. So what gives between the quick scan taking less than 4 minutes to scan all those exclusions when ashquick was still going after 10 minutes for 4 files and still 9 files left to go. Was my assumption previously that the Quick scan skirts over these .v21 files ?

I think I have more than done my part to try and find out what is going on. Now it really is time for Alwil to look at what changes were made and why it might have an impact. Even if this means running 4.7 and 4.8 scans against the same data as Alan did, which clearly shows there is a big difference in scan duration.

I haven't had to do anything to replicate the problem, it was just there.
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neiby

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Re: Avast! is now "slower than molasses" and reports false scan times!
« Reply #33 on: April 04, 2008, 03:54:45 PM »
Tech and Vik:

You're both probably right; I just hope that there are no problems behind the scenes with the "on access" scanning, too. 

As I've mentioned before, I suffer from an anxiety disorder, which makes things always seem worse to me!

I hang my head in shame. . . .

I was not trying to "blame" anybody!

MARSHALL

I would recommend that you just stop blaming your anxiety disorder and start acting a bit more professionally. If it is that much of a problem, write your posts and then read through them again before you post them. That will give you some time to edit them before you post. The users and the Avast! employees on this forum are trying to help you, but you come across as being impatient and antagonistic. The people here are wonderful. The support you'll receive from the people at Alwil (Avast) is better than anything you'll find elsewhere. Just relax and let them help you solve this problem. I'm sure you'll be pleased with the support you receive. You're using a user support forum and the software developers are participating in helping you to solve this problem. That is not very common and we should all be grateful that Alwil has such a strong commitment to quality customer support.

Offline alanrf

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Re: Avast! is now "slower than molasses" and reports false scan times!
« Reply #34 on: April 04, 2008, 04:40:23 PM »
While I agree with all the comments about the great support afforded by this forum let's no go overboard on MarshallO.

We've seen far worse frustration vented here from time to time - probably even by me. 

Sometimes we forget that the avast folks are trying to juggle a number of issues at once at a time like this and it can appear that the problem we care about is not getting the attention we feel it deserves.

In this case I know that the developers are working the problem - but as Vlk mentioned earlier - it is a matter of perspective.  A scan taking a few minutes longer is not really as important as the problems of those folks who are experiencing more serious issues like an inability to start their system/hangs/crashes etc.   

neiby

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Re: Avast! is now "slower than molasses" and reports false scan times!
« Reply #35 on: April 04, 2008, 04:42:45 PM »
I just ran a quick scan with no archives and it seemed to take longer than I would have expected. It took 40 minutes to scan 100 GB (132,000 files). I would have thought that a quick scan with no archives would have been much faster than that. I know this isn't diagnostic because I didn't ever time scans with 4.7. This actually doesn't seem to be a huge problem. Honestly, how often do people do full scans and sit there and wait for them to finish? This doesn't really seem to affect on-access scanning, webshield, or any of the other "immediate" scanners.

Offline alanrf

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Re: Avast! is now "slower than molasses" and reports false scan times!
« Reply #36 on: April 04, 2008, 04:48:11 PM »
If however you find that you've gone away to have dinner and last time when you came back the scan was finished and this time it still tuns for another half hour you might be a bit put out - and when a new release comes out people do tend to look a bit more closely.

The time taken by avast scans comes up frequently enough in this forum so it would be incorrect to say "who cares how long it takes".  Apart from anything else the avast team ought to care - and they do.

Just look through the forum this week and count up the number of .... if this isn't fixed in the next 30 seconds I'm going to another antivirus adn I will tell all my friends to stop using avast .... posts. 
« Last Edit: April 04, 2008, 04:50:30 PM by alanrf »

Offline igor

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Re: Avast! is now "slower than molasses" and reports false scan times!
« Reply #37 on: April 04, 2008, 04:49:36 PM »
Could somebody please confirm (or deny) that the slowdown of the quick scan occurs only when "All local disks" are selected to be scanned - while if you go to folder selection, and select all your local disks from there, it doesn't occur?

neiby

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Re: Avast! is now "slower than molasses" and reports false scan times!
« Reply #38 on: April 04, 2008, 04:51:17 PM »
Well, I didn't mean it quite that way. If scans are taking much longer than they used to then there is a problem. I'm just saying that we shouldn't overstate the problem. It's not as if this problem is breaking any functionality. Hopefully, it's a minor fixable issue. As long as all of the other on-access stuff is working properly, your PC is protected. It is an annoyance to have slow scans, but it's temporary and fixable...at least I hope that's the case.  :)

Offline alanrf

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Re: Avast! is now "slower than molasses" and reports false scan times!
« Reply #39 on: April 04, 2008, 04:51:51 PM »
The slowdown is very evident whether it is all local disks or folder selection.

Offline Lisandro

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Re: Avast! is now "slower than molasses" and reports false scan times!
« Reply #40 on: April 04, 2008, 04:52:02 PM »
What we need here is a cooperative effort with avast that goes beyond "we cannot reproduce" to a "how can we diagnose the problem.  And you know that I will be here all hours. Let's get to it.
I feel uncomfortable trying to help when I'm not experiencing trouble.
In my tests, for some reason, Pro (Task) scanning seems to be faster than Home (Folder selection), indeed seems slow... but I wish a benchmark test could be defined: do this, this way, check the time... etc., etc.

The slowdown is very evident whether it is all local disks or folder selection.
What do you mean? Folder selection seems slower in my case...
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neiby

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Re: Avast! is now "slower than molasses" and reports false scan times!
« Reply #41 on: April 04, 2008, 04:52:16 PM »
Could somebody please confirm (or deny) that the slowdown of the quick scan occurs only when "All local disks" are selected to be scanned - while if you go to folder selection, and select all your local disks from there, it doesn't occur?


I'll do another quick scan by manually selecting the same disks as before and I'll see if the scan time is any different.

Offline alanrf

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Re: Avast! is now "slower than molasses" and reports false scan times!
« Reply #42 on: April 04, 2008, 04:55:26 PM »
Igor,

the very slow Filemon timings scan I sent to Vlk was on a folder selection.

neiby

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Re: Avast! is now "slower than molasses" and reports false scan times!
« Reply #43 on: April 04, 2008, 05:14:53 PM »
Okay, this is very interesting. I just ran another quick scan with no archives but I manually selected my drives, the same two drives that were scanned before. The first time I did the scan, over 132,000 files were scanned and it took over 40 minutes. This time, only 31,000 files were scanned and it took 20 minutes.

Hmm....

Offline DavidR

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Re: Avast! is now "slower than molasses" and reports false scan times!
« Reply #44 on: April 04, 2008, 07:19:54 PM »
Could somebody please confirm (or deny) that the slowdown of the quick scan occurs only when "All local disks" are selected to be scanned - while if you go to folder selection, and select all your local disks from there, it doesn't occur?

Well this raises more questions than answers.

Previous Quick scan, no archives, local disks,
files and folders   39647/3866
Run Time           15:48
Total scanned     7.3GB

Folder selection, C, D, F, G (what local disks would scan), sensitivity = Quick , no archives.
 
files and folders   18503/3867
Run Time           11:12
Total scanned     4.6GB

Why the huge disparity in files scanned, when the two scans have the same sensitivity, no archives and drives selected ?

So unfortunately this can't be used to compare, but perhaps it can be used to try and find why the local disk Quick and Standard scans are almost identical. Are they perhaps the same processing when they shouldn't be.

Interestingly the run time of 11:12 is almost identical for 4.7 Standard scan, no archives, local disks when the number of files scanned was 39,000+
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