That might be true and I don't doubt it.
However, I used many many firewalls and been running torrents for years, never seen this huge spikes with any of them.
OA is the one with similar problems (second to avast which is no.1 for sure) , but in OA it's not that huge , but it's large.
With Avast, after say 12hrs of usage you can't watch a movie anymore or listen to music, it is that high (DPC checker is all red with spikes over 8k)
Without using torrents , latency is normal , never goes above 120-130 , when you start using it, it slowly goes up and up, after hour or two it's 4k.
At that point sound starts to crack.
I mean, I'm not bashing Avast or anything, I'm using it and I want to use it, I like it's firewall, there is just this issue.
If what you said is true (hardware related) , how is it then that other firewalls are working fine, same setup, same OS, same everything.
It's something in Avast firewall driver / service.