What were you doing whilst this is like that, listening to streaming audio, video, just browsing, etc. ?
What is your browser ?
You can click the avast ‘a’ icon, which will open the On-Access Protection screen, if you see a button Details… click it and you will see icons on the left. Select the Web Shield icon and click Terminate, you will be asked if you want to persist the changes, for now answer No or it will continue in the next boot.
These are my current TM readings and I too have XP Pro, Firefox, web shield enabled and just browsing on the forums. The VM Size we have been informed provides a more accurate figure of memory use, though the Mem Usage is 39,900 way, way lower that the 191MB figure yours is showing.
I’m not sure that seamonkey is in the list of supported browsers (I know it is the old mozilla browser, but now re-branded), unfortunately there is nowhere a user can look to see what are the supported browsers.
What are the usual things in the background, I don’t know, especially if they have any Internet interface ?
Pausing in the web shield only pauses the scanning, but traffic still goes through the proxy, so if seamonkey is a supported browser the web shield proxy is still used, I don’t know if that would rack up CPU as it isn’t being scanned as normal.
The only other thing I can think of is, have (or did) you another AV installed in this system, if so what was it and how did you get rid of it ?
A dump of the ashWebSv.exe process would be very interesting.
Please note that prior to taking it, you’ll have to temporarily disable avast self defense - otherwise, the program responsible for creation of the dump won’t be able to open the process.
To create the dump, download and run http://public.avast.com/~vlk/hangrep.exe . In the list of processes select ashWebSv.exe and use the Save button. This generates a file which you can either send to his email address vlk (at) avast.com (if it’s smaller than e.g. 1 MB, ZIPed), or upload to ftp://ftp.avast.com/incoming
The command-line version http://public.avast.com/~vlk/userdump.exe . The syntax is userdump.exe ashWebSv.exe c:\ashWebSv.dmp
(producing dump file in the root of C:\ drive)
Same problem here… three times in the last month. All of a sudden, my system slows dramatically, I can not access any web sites (“loading”) - both FF 3.01 and IE7, but strangely I retain email capabilities. A check of task manager shows the ashwebsv.exe process using 95%+ CPU. A reboot solves the problem, but this seems to be a glitch. I was a long time user of AVG and have been pleased with Avast to date aside from this issue.
Since this problem dates from April it may not be entirely the same issue, which I would have hoped would have been resolved as there have been a couple of program updates since April.
I don’t know if this might have an impact on your problem, but there is a very recent program update (last day or so) available, version 4.8.1229. So I would advise doing a manual update if you aren’t using that version. As there would be little point in chasing a possible in an old version of avast.
I updated the program earlier in the week to the latest version (1229). Unfortunately, this bug presented itself again this evening. All of a sudden, all web activity ceased and the ashwebsv.exe process was going wild. I was unable to close that process (denied), so again a reboot was required to restore order. This problem seems to be associated with a large number of open tabs within Firefox (at least that is always the case when I am impacted by it).
I sure hope this problem can be resolved and in short order as it is becoming quite annoying. I don’t want to go back to AVG, but I never ran into computer paralyzing symptoms from it when I was using that program.
UPDATE: in perusing this forum I stumbled onto the following link… seems there might be a connection to the problems noted in this thread and many are suffering from it: http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=37024.0
Any other security programs? Firewall, antispywares…
Is there any useful information into Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Events, specially ‘Errors’?
Any Firefox extension that could have bring problems?
I’m not sure… I’m trying to guess that any error info occurred just before WebShield collapses and start using 100% of the CPU.
Check the folder \data\log
Are there any files called unpXXXX (where XXXX is a random number) or *.mdmp there?
If so, send them to vlk (at) avast.com
They may contain more information about the problem (maybe a link to this thread).
Just happened again to me. >:( I was unable to stop the ashwebsv.exe process and a system reboot was my only remedy. I checked the mentioned folder and there is not any sign of files with the names/extensions identified.
I transitioned from AVG as it was asking for me to update when the latest version/signature files were already running… Avast suffers from this periodic bug… which is the greater nuisance? Perhaps there is another product which does not suffer from annoying glitches? Probably not…
I’ve been having the same exact problem for a couple of months. I’ve been using Avast for years now and this problem has only come up recently so I’m guessing it’s something to do with a recent update.
I encounter this bug about once a week. I will be surfing in Firefox and suddenly no websites will respond. I check Task Manager and ashwebsv.exe is taking all available CPU cycles. I can close Firefox and confirm the process has ended, and still it is sucking my CPU. This affects both FF3 and IE7, not allowing any web pages to load. My Trillian instant messenger stays connected and allows messages through.
Today it happened again and I tried to stop the avast Web Scanner service, but after 2 minutes it told me the service could not be stopped because it was not responding. Restarting is the only way I know to get my web browsing back.
I did notice today right after restarting that Avast updated its virus definitions. Perhaps this is due to Avast hanging while trying to update.
