ashServ.exe is taking alot of CPU Usage

[lt.Data]

in the past few dayes this process began to take alot of CPU Usage 50% and more.
i have an old PC pentium 4 3GHz 2.5 GB of RAM and im useing windows XP.

any idea may this is happening?

thank you lt.data.

[nmb]

what is your avast program version?

right click avast tray icon > about.

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[lt.Data]

what is your avast program version?

right click avast tray icon > about.

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4.8 home edition

[DavidR]

The ashServ.exe is the main scanning engine in avast 4.8, so depending on what you are doing you are going to get spikes in CPU use as files are scanned, this however should quickly return to lower levels, unless there is a lot of activity going on.

Although this information relates to 100% CPU usage, you can check out the three points:
-- ashServ.exe 100% CPU - Vlk, always says that the guidelines for solving of the problem "ashServ.exe using too much CPU" has always been the same:
1. Check if the avast tray icon is spinning (while CPU usage is high) ?
2. If it is, click it (wait for the dialogue box to open), and check which file is being scanned (the Last Scanned field); the Scanned Count value should be increasing (spinning icon means a scan is in progress)
3. Find out which of the providers is scanning the file (click "Details" button and check out the Last Scanned value for each of the providers). The most common providers that may cause this are Standard Shield, P2P Shield and IM Shield.

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What are/were you doing when this happened ?
What else has changed on your system recently ?

[nmb]

the latest version is 4.8.1356. What is yours?

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[lt.Data]

i have the 4.8-1356 version.

And yes, the tray icon is spinning like a fire ball.
I looked at the scanned count and it is rising slowly on the p2p shield, and even more slowly on the standard shield.

I terminated the p2p shield, but the CPU usage didnt go down

[DavidR]

If there is no major scanning (p2p in the background) activity then I would expect the CPU to go down. Whilst typing this and nothing else going on my cpu activity is peaking at about 4% dropping to 1%.

My Core2Duo is obviously faster but the main thing is that the Standard Shield isn't scanning anything whilst posting this as there is no other activity. So what is being scanned by the Standard Shield, some things like desktop search tools and indexing are constantly going on and this generates activity that avast is likely to scan. A long time ago I disabled indexing in both the OS and MS Word (Office).

Try this in the Standard Shield to get an idea of what it is scanning and perhaps it will give an idea why it is scanning - Left click on the avast 'a' icon, click the Details... >> button if shown, select the Standard Shield provider > Customize > Advanced - 'Show detailed info on performed actions' this option is off by default.

What sensitivity do you have the Standard Shield set to, Normal is the default.

[lt.Data]

it is going mad when i turn on my utorrent. i dont know why, i recently update it, when i think about it.
I unmark the utorrent from the p2p shield list i hope it will help.

[DavidR]

I do, it is the way uTorrent works as it creates lots of small files (this cause avast to scan these masses of small files), which when completed are stitched together, that is why the utorrent p2p app is unchecked by default in the P2P Shield (so you must have first checked it).

I don't use utorrent or any p2p fir that matter, but if it has the option to have your AV scan the completed download, this is the path you should enter if it has that function, C:\Program Files\Alwil Software\Avast4\ashQuick.exe.

[Lisandro]

Seems it will be the same on avast 5, i.e., won't scan utorrent by default 

[lt.Data]

thanx for the help.