ashServ.exe becomes too busy

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

Hello,

Already some members noticed that ‘ashServ.exe’ takes sometimes much of CPU time.

I have four PCs:

XP Pro SP2 with Avast4.6 Pro
XP Home SP2 with Avast4.6 Pro
XP Home SP2 with Avast4.6 Home
Mellinium with Avast4.5 Pro

Only in the first PC, the ‘ashServ.exe’ might slow down all other programs.
Now my Solution is to reboot it every time that abnormal behavior starts.

I stopped P2P shield and generated a fresh VRDB but the problem still reappear in a rather random situations.
Are there any hints to help me better analyse the cause?

Thank you.

Kerim

2

Is the avast (a) ball tray icon spinning while ashServ.exe is taking up the CPU?
If so, double click it and select “Details >>” to find out what is being scanned, and by which provider.

Thx Vlk

3

Thank you Vlk.

I’ll follow your advice next time that happens and let you know.

4

Hi Vlk,

“Is the avast (a) ball tray icon spinning while ashServ.exe is taking up the CPU?”

No

“If so, double click it and select “Details >>” to find out what is being scanned, and by which provider.”

I double clicked it. It was the ‘Standard Shield’ scanning the files in “C:\Windows.…”.

It started I think after an XP (Pro SP2 up to date) warning popped up saying that a Win32 Service has to be closed and asking if I want to send the error report. I didn’t since my internet connection was disabled at that time.
For instance I noticed also that 4 files was generated by XP (during that pop-up windows) in a temp folder (in the user local settings) ready to be sent (but then deleted automatically). Two of them are text files. If necessary, next time I can compress a copy of them in one zip file to be analyzed later, but surely not by me :slight_smile:

Thank you,

Kerim

5

Hi again Vlk,

Today I updated Avast to 4.6.603.

I wonder if there is an Avast log file(s) on my PC in which I (or you) may find why suddenly
‘ashServ.exe’ decides to scan the “Windows” folder by taking much of CPU time (up to 90%)?

Disabling 'Scan created/modified files’ didn’t help.

As I said, my solution now is to reboot… it helps calming down ‘ashServ.exe’ for a while :wink:

Thanks, Kerim

6

  1. The latest version is 4.6.623 are you sure you have 4.6.603?

  2. When does it decide to scan the Windows folder (the complete folder or just parts), after boot when programs are loading in windows (this is normal)?

  3. ashServ.exe uses high priority so it can complete quickly and hand back to other processes quickly.

7

Hi David,

As soon as I read your reply I updated to 4.6.623

Today the same problem started while organizing files between the PC HD and my backup USB mini hard 1GB.

But before the usual reboot (to reset ‘ashserv.exe’ as usual), I noticed the following:

1- although ‘ashserv.exe’ is taking up to 90% of CPU time, the Avast (a) ball is not spinning.
2- the Standard Shield was scanning many folders (at random) and not only ‘Windows’.
3- even after pausing the Standard Shield and nothing had being scanned by all other shields, ‘ashserv.exe’ continued running and having peaks at 90%!
4- there were no log files (or activity window) to monitor that abnormal and sudden busy mode of ‘ashserv.exe’.

As I said in my first post here, I have that problem only on one of my 4 PCs.
All are protected by Avast, Spybot - Search & Destroy and SpywareBlaster only (and their internal XP firewall).

I wonder if there is a way to spot the cause… perhaps a utility of some sort.

Thanks, Kerim

8

Are you sure that in the systems with avast! Pro you did not schedule a scanning?

9

You got it Technical… Thank you very much. :slight_smile:
‘C scan’ was indeed enabled (daily at 9 AM) since few weeks. ???
It seems I am getting old to forget such obvious thing! :-\

10

It took me a lot of time for debugging this in the past.
After we have the answer, it’s easy :slight_smile: