Time Machine Issue - System Unresponsive

[sailfishray]

Ever since I installed Avast version 7.0 for MAC every time the MAC Time Machine starts it's hourly backup, my system is unresponsive for a few minutes...almost looks likes it's frozen.  It will eventually start working but this gets very frustrating because I can not continue my work.

I've excluded the entire volume (hard drive) that is dedicated to the backups by going to preferences, shields, file system shield but the issue is still occurring.  Does any have any suggestions?

Thanks for you help!

[.: Mac :.]

What are you using to back up to with Time machine? External Hard Drive, or a Time Capsule? Can you disable the File shield and see if this unresponsive behavior improves?

[sailfishray]

I'm using an external hard drive that has been excluded from the file system.  I also tried disabling file systems as you suggested but the same thing happened when Time Machine kicked off again.

[paul_l]

I've been experiencing a similar problem over the last 2 days ... right after installing the latest Avast for Mac. I can only assume that Avast is the cause as nothing else has changes. In checking the console logs, I see that my iMac seems to hang when a Time Capsule backup is in progress (FYI ... I use a Time Capsule 2 TB). I also checked in the console for messages containing avast and see many examples of the the following:

Apr  2 19:41:25 imac-2 com.apple.launchd[1] (com.avast.proxy[1506]): Job appears to have crashed: Segmentation fault: 11
Apr  2 19:41:25 imac-2 com.apple.launchd[1] (com.avast.proxy): Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds
Apr  2 19:41:25 imac-2 ReportCrash[1500]: Saved crash report for com.avast.proxy[1506] version () to /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/com.avast.proxy_2012-04-02-194125_localhost.crash
Apr  2 19:41:25 imac-2 ReportCrash[1500]: Removing excessive log: file://localhost/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/

Please note that the crash report referenced above does not seem to exist at the location indicated. Also, I have attached the complete log in case it helps. The problem only seems to occur if no one is using the machine, since everything is OK while someone is working at the Mac. It is when someone from the family tries to logon to their account that we experience the problem (Note: My screen saver locks the screen). Hope this helps. In the meantime, I'm going to disable the File System Shield to see if this helps things at all.

[tumic]

First of all - install the latest avast! beta version (36454) from here: http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=78646.0

If the problem still persists with the latest version, send us please one of the crash logs the system creates. You will find it in /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports named com.avast.proxy_*_localhost.crash (there will be a date and a random number instead the star in the name)

[mity]

Sailfishray,

what Mac OS X version do you have?
Have you used any special settings of the Time Machine?
Does it happen also for manually started Time Machine backups?
If yes, start avast! app and go to the File System Shield page, so you can see the activity chart and start the time machine backup manually, does it extremely grow?
Can you provide portion of the /var/log/avastdaemon.log file, which corresponds to the time of a Time Machine backup?
Can you take a look in /var/log/avastfileshield.log if there is anything interesting?

Regards,
Mity

[paul_l]

Tumic ... I sent you a separate email with the log file a few days ago. Any update? Or should I install Sophos instead? Thanks.

[tumic]

Tumic ... I sent you a separate email with the log file a few days ago. Any update? Or should I install Sophos instead? Thanks.

Thanks for the crash report. I have identified and fixed the problem, the patch will be included in the next program update. Note, that the crash occurs only if you have both shields off, so switching at least one of them on should fix your problem.