huge CPU consumption of MacAvastHelper

[Ovidiu]

My MB Pro started getting noisy, the fan wouldn't stop for about 1h until I checked my running processes and found MacAvastHelper cosntantly at 100% CPU for a long time (I guess the whole hour)

After force-closing it all is well again :-)

see here for screen shot please: http://screencast.com/t/co4NHIkkYO3

[Ovidiu]

and now a few hours later it was com.Avast.MacAvast.Mad going rogue, had to actually restart, couldn't do anything anymore :-(

http://screencast.com/t/75ZsByrkN0LZ

[AvastThree]

This is still an issue in the release version (7.0 (36770)).

It was reported by many users in the beta thread, but no one from Avast replied or took the beta testers up on their offers for logs or other diagnostics.

Disappointing to see it released with a known issue like this.

[zilog]

and now a few hours later it was com.Avast.MacAvast.Mad going rogue, had to actually restart, couldn't do anything anymore :-(

http://screencast.com/t/75ZsByrkN0LZ

Hallo,
it's not this daemon, probably, who's the primary cause. Some application might modify one big file repeatedly, or, modify more smaller files steadily. This leads to the need to scan the newly-placed content again and again, and, this might cause overhead.

Solution would be to start complete logging (ad admin, go to /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.avast.daemon.plist, edit this file - the 0x00000002 replace with 0xffffffff). Then, reboot, and when the cause shows up again, in your /var/log/avastdaemon.log will be the cause, now pretty visible. Anyway, we 're interested in the culprit, when in doubts, please, send us the log (compressed, probably tail -n1000000 cut).

regards,
pc

[AvastThree]

Any word on whether the program update today solves this issue?

[tumic]

Any word on whether the program update today solves this issue?

There were some changes in the helper that may fix it, but as we could not reproduce this issue, we can not guarantee that...

[sejtam]

for me now,

/Library/Application Support/Avast/files/vps/com.avast.MacAvast.MAD

is running at 100% making *everything*  run extremely sluggish. I am about to uninstall Avast again

I'm on 7.0 (37028) with Virus Defs 12052900

between the above process, mdworker and mds, my CPU is constantly busy..

PID   COMMAND          %CPU TIME     #TH  #WQ  #POR #MREG RPRVT  RSHRD  RSIZE  VPRVT  VSIZE  PGRP PPID STATE    UID  FAULTS    COW    MSGSENT  MSGRECV  SYSBSD   SYSMACH  CSW      PAGEINS USER
131-  com.avast.MacAva 93.4 24:48.02 57/1 0    88   199+  63M+   5412K  56M+   145M+  769M+  60   60   running  0    21696286+ 215    1790+    895+     690579+  1553+    835460+  848110  root
35    mds              64.7 02:47.95 7    6    108- 494+  377M-  5032K  415M+  5303M+ 7699M+ 35   1    stuck    0    1699821+  668    110081+  60485+   301395+  67862+   197705+  40717   root
499   mdworker         26.5 01:23.36 3/1  1    52   124+  22M+   10M    78M+   126M+  2514M+ 499  1    running  502  608481+   509    8753     2662     126652+  6406     87672+   554     mathias

[AvastThree]

This is still happening for me with app 37028 and definitions 12052901, and it's with com.avast.MacAvast.MAD.

Super-high CPU consumption slowing down my computer, causing my fans to run, etc. Can't use the file shield, which renders the program largely worthless.

[tumic]

com.avast.MacAvast.MAD is the engine, not the helper app.  This may or may not be an issue as some files simply need not negligible CPU time to be scanned. If you think it is an issue, please use a separate forum thread for reporting it.

[zilog]

This is still happening for me with app 37028 and definitions 12052901, and it's with com.avast.MacAvast.MAD.

Super-high CPU consumption slowing down my computer, causing my fans to run, etc. Can't use the file shield, which renders the program largely worthless.

Hallo, some badly written software (typically, USB-scanner bundled utilites etc.) might modify your filesystem repeatedly.
The fact that your fileshield's on/off state influences the overall performance of the machine is a sign of this problem.

Open ActivityMonitor, sort the processes by their CPU column, and with high probability, you will see the culprit. It's also wise to turn off avast's shields to get rid of com.avast.MacAvast.MAD activity, which is indeed great, but as a consequence only.

In the case of no succesful find, we can increase logging abilities of our shields in the next update, making such identification easier.

Regards,
pc

[nohairdave]

Checking out the logs, they pointed at the culprit for me.  It was my parallels VM hard disk.

Perhaps some simple advice would be for anyone using VMs to have Avast installed on the VM, then remove the folder containing the VM's hard disk from the Mac Avast Filesheilds (via settings...Fieldsheilds...Advanced...Exclude)

[emilhauk]

In my case it seems overly interested in iPhoto.

Specifically:
/Users/<username>/Pictures/iPhoto Library/Database/apdb/

The program are running, but I'm not importing any images, browsing or manipulating images. I guess photo stream does some background work, but do the daemon really need to be that aggressive?

Would it really have beed such a security issue to scan a file which changes continuously on a periodic basis or at least non-constant instead?