nice avast

[sejtam]

When scanning the filessystem, avast uses up much CPU and makes the rest of teh system sluggish.
Could something be done to (optionally) a) bind avast to one CPU and nice(2) it down so that it does not
affect interactivity so much?

[Jan Gahura]

Hi,

What do you mean by the interactivity? The GUI interactivity shouldn't be affected by the scanning process.

We see more users complaining about "sluggishness" of a machine while using avast! in some circumstances. We'd like to collect as much info as possible to solve these issues.

Jan

[zilog]

When scanning the filessystem, avast uses up much CPU and makes the rest of teh system sluggish.
Could something be done to (optionally) a) bind avast to one CPU and nice(2) it down so that it does not
affect interactivity so much?

Hallo,
we can try adding a customisable priority level to the central scanning process. When this priority is lower (= numerically higher) than other applications, you:

- won't notice any sluggish performance degradation when doing "unrelated" background on-demand scans
- on-access scanning stays unaffected (there's some amount of machine time, necessary to complete a scan, but this action is blocking, and thus able to "steal" machine time from the stopped calling application)

You can test this mode manually with the current version:
- become root (terminal, sudo bash)
- renice the com.avast.MacAvast.MAD's PID (renice that_cpu_eating_pid +20)
- please report whether this is whay you want, or not

Binding a process to a particular CPU core would be a partial solution (maybe good for Windows, but we're on POSIX:).

Regards,
pc