I'm having two problems with avast:
1) A clear memory leak generated when avast carries out a scan - this is not being reported by the activity monitor as and individual process which is hogging memory, but the reported free memory is certainly falling as avast carries out its scan. This memory is NOT released on quitting avast. I have a macbook pro and 4gb of memory.
2) anti virus daemon crashes on checking the Developer folder (root level)
Hallo,
ad2) in the 0.0.68 engine there were some minor leaks (let's say one or two kilobytes total), and one flaw in the very-long path processing. was fixed by 0.0.69,
but, there's now quite fresh release candidate 0.0.82-xxx available (sticky-post on the top of this forum part), worth trying.
ad 1) - avast has two main parts - gui and daemon. both entities run like well-behaved processes, there's no extra allocation outside their address space.
pc
the reported "free memory" is a rather vague thing - all modern systems have a vfs-cache, which shares basically the same memory pagepool with common processes. thus, performing any disk activity (mmap, read, write...) causes the accessed data to be cached there and the reported amount is decreased. This occurs when there's some free memory (it's better to utilise it as a cache than to keep it free and unusued) and thus the reported amount drop significantly down.
But, on demand, those cached pages would be made available again, simply by dropping the cached contents.
