Author Topic: Avast! is now "slower than molasses" and reports false scan times!  (Read 39771 times)

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Offline alanrf

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Re: Avast! is now "slower than molasses" and reports false scan times!
« Reply #75 on: April 05, 2008, 10:30:29 PM »
I must keep up ... I missed a whole page while sleeping.

Igor,

for me scanning the same disk (the non-ashquick scans were Quick - no archive)

ashquick:___________  00:00:02
Simple UI - no skin ___  00:00:23
Using avist skin ______  00:01:44

Offline alanrf

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Re: Avast! is now "slower than molasses" and reports false scan times!
« Reply #76 on: April 05, 2008, 10:40:52 PM »
I just turned off the "transparency" effect in settings and repeated the same tests:

ashquick:___________  00:00:02
Simple UI - no skin ___  00:00:21
Using avist skin ______  00:00:30

Offline igor

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Re: Avast! is now "slower than molasses" and reports false scan times!
« Reply #77 on: April 05, 2008, 11:06:01 PM »
How many / what files are there that ashQuick is able to scan it in 2 seconds?

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Re: Avast! is now "slower than molasses" and reports false scan times!
« Reply #78 on: April 05, 2008, 11:30:09 PM »
I don't know if this will help anything, but I just found out about the SUI (I only thought that all we had were "skins"!), and got the following results on my latest "Quick" Scan using SUI, and only asking for a Scan of the Hard Drive:

Number of scanned files/folders:  96,822/19,877          (NOTE: I didn't check the box for any "folders" to be scanned.)
Runtime of last scan:                 00:21:38        (Hardly a "Quick" scan to my way of thinking.)
Number of infected files:            0
Total size of scanned files:         18.8 GB

I don't if this information helps anybody with anything, but I thought I'd post it, since the scan time is approximately the same as it took me to do a "Quick" scan with a skin, and it would therefore seem to me that skins therefore probably have little or nothing to do with the problem.

Remember, I'm not that computer-literate, and perhaps I've contributed nothing!

Good luck finding out what's wrong!

Offline alanrf

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Re: Avast! is now "slower than molasses" and reports false scan times!
« Reply #79 on: April 05, 2008, 11:39:15 PM »
Igor,

I simply used this to remove the physical file scans from the issue. 

This is the same disk I have described to you before ... all of the files on it (structure provided above in this thread) are excluded.

However I do note that all those new failed registry RecentItemList searches are taking about 200 milliseconds per directory entry.  When you have 20,000 directory entries that's some very expensive registry processing.

Offline igor

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Re: Avast! is now "slower than molasses" and reports false scan times!
« Reply #80 on: April 05, 2008, 11:48:48 PM »
I might be missing some info here :)
What RecentItemList searches are you talking about? ;)

So, you excludeed all the files? What form does the exclusion have? *.* - or something else?
Thanks!

Offline alanrf

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Re: Avast! is now "slower than molasses" and reports false scan times!
« Reply #81 on: April 06, 2008, 12:20:29 AM »
*.xxx

Just as in the 4.7 system running next to this one.

Offline alanrf

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Re: Avast! is now "slower than molasses" and reports false scan times!
« Reply #82 on: April 06, 2008, 01:11:21 AM »
Quote
What RecentItemList searches are you talking about?

See attached screenshots of RecentItemList registry lookups by ashSimp2.exe for scanning the same folder in 4.7 versus 4.8
« Last Edit: April 06, 2008, 01:22:11 AM by alanrf »

Offline igor

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Re: Avast! is now "slower than molasses" and reports false scan times!
« Reply #83 on: April 06, 2008, 01:22:57 AM »
Hmm, what the hell are they doing there? Certainly not intentional... seems like a third, separate issue.
Thanks for that.

Offline alanrf

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Re: Avast! is now "slower than molasses" and reports false scan times!
« Reply #84 on: April 06, 2008, 11:23:12 AM »
Hi again igor,

I have been a little puzzled by the discrepancies in the admittedly somewhat subjective reports on scan times.  Some folks seem to see a large effect and some smaller and you saw practically none initially.  So I began to wonder if it might not be related to variables in our setups and specifically the size of our exclusion lists. I thought to experiment a bit.

I do not know if this observation is any use to you ....

I just uninstalled 4.8 and did a fresh install and made no changes to the default settings (specifically the on demand exclusion list is empty).

If I run the SUI and scan the folder I have been talking about then the scan for a Quick scan (no archive) is 0 seconds.

If I add just one entry to the on demand exclusion list of the type *.xxx that covers 0% of the files in folder structure then the Quick scan time remains 0 seconds.

If I add just one entry to the on demand exclusion list that covers 99% of the files in folder structure then the Quick scan time jumps to 31 seconds.

If I use a skinned interface (avist) with the excusion list empty then the Quick scan is also 0 seconds and with the single (99% cover) entry in the exclusions list then the Quick scan goes to 38 seconds.

If this hypothesis holds any water then those of us that have built an on demand scan exclusion list that includes large areas of our disk surfaces might expect (currently at least) to see much longer scan times than those with no or small (or ineffective) exclusion lists and those longer scan times would be amplified if using a skinned interface.

Just for your consideration ...

Time to go restore the system again.
« Last Edit: April 06, 2008, 11:29:10 AM by alanrf »

Grays

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Re: Avast! is now "slower than molasses" and reports false scan times!
« Reply #85 on: April 06, 2008, 01:26:40 PM »
DavidR wrote

Quote
I suspect you have somewhat more than 180MB of data on your system, when the minimum RAM is usually in the 512MB-1GB, so I suspect you HDD is somewhat larger than 180MB.

If you only have one PC and you have continued to work on it, like browsing and posting this, then the scan will take much longer, even more so than the current slow scans.

Sorry should have been clearer in my post. My machine is AMD XP2500, 1gb Ram, 1 80gb and 1 250gb HD. I left the scan to  run without any others process going until I became concerned and looked up this forum and posted.

Cheers

Offline DavidR

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Re: Avast! is now "slower than molasses" and reports false scan times!
« Reply #86 on: April 06, 2008, 02:16:56 PM »
That explains a little more, the Thorough scan is by its nature very thorough and will scan every file on your system if you have also elected to scan archives. So a lot depends on how much data is on those drives. Even in 4.7 the thorough scan took a considerable time if you had lots of data and elected to scan archives.

Personally I don't do thorough scans (did one when avast first installed) with archives but do a Standard Scan, which brings to to a more reasonable duration even with this increase on duration many are seeing.
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Offline MikeBCda

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Re: Avast! is now "slower than molasses" and reports false scan times!
« Reply #87 on: April 06, 2008, 06:56:04 PM »
Just to add some stats to the overall response.  On my system (see signature), I'm now taking about 17 minutes to do a standard scan of about 4.5 gigs, without archives, with 4.8, as compared with about 12 minutes using 4.7.
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