Good Bye Avast - I need my CPU Back

[mayakovski]

Well it's been fun.

I have been a happy Avast user since 2003, used it at home, in my company and have used it for the companies I used to support.  But no more, I simply cannot use an AV program that regularly uses between 80% and 100% of my CPU doing nothing and eats up around 100 MB of RAM even with all shields off..

Even when I disable all shields and having nothing but Windows XP SP3 running the AvastSvc.exe hogs the CPU almost non stop.

This started happening about 5 days ago to all 3 of my computers, I have ensured everything is up to date, uninstalled malwarebytes, made sure no other Anti-Virus programs are running and still the same thing.  The systems are basically unusable due to the Avast use of the CPU.  The most amazing thing is that this even happens with all shields disabled.

This was happening to my Toshiba laptop with 1.7GHz and 512 MB RAM, to my work machine with 2.8GHz and 1 GB RAM and to my gaming system with 3.0GHz and 2 GB RAM.

I have removed Avast 5 from all 3 systems and installed Avira, now my systems are back to working again.

I'll try Avast again someday once the bugs have been worked out of version 5.

[maxwachtel]

Something is wrong with your install. I just checked my system and the report was
AvastSvc.exe 00 cpu,mem 13.9,peak mem 30.2
Running w2k 233mz/160mb

[mayakovski]

Something is wrong with your install. I just checked my system and the report was
AvastSvc.exe 00 cpu,mem 13.9,peak mem 30.2
Running w2k 233mz/160mb

Not sure how it could be the install as this happened on all three of my computers.  And one of them (the gaming one) I wiped blank, reinstalled Windows XP, installed Avast 5, and that was it, as soon as the system rebooted AvastSvc.exe went crazy and acted as before.

[DavidR]

No such problem on mine XP Pro SP3, image of cpu and resources taken whilst viewing this topic.

[faust]

No problems here, either, on my XP Pro SP3 machine, though I did have an odd persistent surge in "System" CPU use that *appeared* to be associated with the newly installed v5.0, but that resolved itself after a reboot.

[maxwachtel]

What version of avast are you using? free? pro? suite?

[mayakovski]

What version of avast are you using? free? pro? suite?

Was using the most up to date version of 5, the free version.

[cazoza]

Well pal, we need the version number you were using if you want us to help you, because that statement of latest version doesn't help, because avast 5 since release date have had some more builds, and the latest is v5.0.462. And if you were using a previous build, maybe the newest have that issues solved. So, what version you were using?

[Shiw Liang]

It seem that it was 4.8

[Vlk]

The CPU hogging problems are usually fairly easy to diagnose - we just need a dump of the offending process. It's usually very fast then to explain what's going on.

BTW you don't have any scheduled scans, rights?

[Maxal]

Hello,

i do have similar problem, cpu usage of 40-50% on laptop with no active scans going on.
avast version 5.0.462, virus definition 100311-0
started few days ago.

laptop specs: intel Core2 Duo CPU T5870 @ 2.00GHz, 2gb ram.

[mayakovski]

Well pal, we need the version number you were using if you want us to help you, because that statement of latest version doesn't help, because avast 5 since release date have had some more builds, and the latest is v5.0.462. And if you were using a previous build, maybe the newest have that issues solved. So, what version you were using?

Hey;

Well the last machine was uninstalled yesterday afternoon, and that was after I had just run both update modules, so I guess the version specifically was what was current yesterday at about 2:00PM.

[cazoza]

Mmmm, i'm the same, i dont know if u are using v4.8 or v5. But what it seems to me is that you are using version 5.0.462. Or am i wrong? Is the avast icon blue or orange?

[Mr.Agent]

me its run really fine here. take about 17-18k and 7-8k

[sharp]

Same for me.

Since I've switched to the new avast release, I notice that the "system" process sometimes uses almost 100% CPU.
I didn't connect that with avast until I decided today to investigate further.
After using tools like process explorer and kernrate, I realized that the culprit was actually an avast process.
I turned off all the avast services and magically, the system process went down to almost 0%. I turned them on and it went back to 90%.
So... good bye avast... too bad... I have to find a new antivirus