Why does avast 4.8 take 17 mb additional more ram?

[davidsama]

Avast 4.7 did not take much of my physical memory but avast 4.8 takes 17mb additional of my physical memory away.  I have 1.5gb physical memory and with 4.7 i could free up memory to 1262mb but with 4.8 i can only get 1245mb.  Why is that?  Also with 4.7 i could shutdown aswUpdSv.exe but with 4.8 it will not let me. Why is that?  I do not want aswUpdSv.exe running all the time.  I am running windows xp
home sp2.

[Vladimyr]

Hi davidsama

I don't have a complete answer to your question (though I'm sure somebody will) but I'd expect that extra features, including self-protection which would "protect" aswupdsv.exe from being stopped, require some RAM-resident components.
I am intrigued as to why you need to free-up so much memory.

[igor]

I don't think avast! 4.8 is using more memory than 4.7 - on contrary, actually, we've done some optimizations in this area.
However:
- any "measurements" of used memory are quite imprecise (many modules are shared across avast! processes, so you can't just sum the numbers)
- it depends heavily on when you check - e.g. on start, it uses more memory, when you wait a while, it gets smaller. When something gets scanned, it might grow again.
- the number of detected viruses increases... the size of the virus database grows... and the size of the memory needed for that grows, too - which we can't do much about, I'm afraid.

As for stopping avast! processes - that's related to the new self-defense features. If you need to, you can disable them in program settings / Troubleshooting page - but I don't think it's worth it, it won't give you any significant amount of system resoures.