I have noticed when scanning local disks, using avast! 4.X Home edition, the virtual memory usage slowly starts to increase. It increases to a point where it eventually runs out of virtual memory. Let me say that I have a set virtual memory size that is 4 times the amount of RAM on my laptop. It is also located on a separate partition on the hard disk. I have an Averatec 3150 laptop with 608+ MB RAM. The laptop has a AMD Athlon XP-M 1600+ processor.
I also use avast! on my desktop. It is an Intel P4 3.2 with Hyper-Threading. Again, I have a fixed amount of virtual memory on a separate partition. avast! does not even budge the virtual memory when I scan the local disks. I have seen and read several post about the VM usage and I have noticed that they are using AMD processors. I am wondering if the VM increase is related to the AMD processors. I understand that they are two different machines but I am just trying to resolve the VM memory issue. avast! is still a great, FREE product!
I don’t think the CPU itself can do any difference - there’s no CPU specific code as far as I know. I’d rather bet on the disk content (any archives?) or some drivers in the system.
What is the name of the affected process? Are also other avast! scanners (Simple UI, Explorer Extension, screensaver maybe) affected?
I am running the simple user interface (ashSimp2.exe). It is performing a thorough scan of all the local hard disks, I have three partitions on the one disk. No other processes seem to affect the VM pagefile. There are some .zip files throughout the disk but none are big enough to make that much of a difference.
It starts the scan process at around 190 MB of PF usage. Starting at 77000 files tested, it jumps to 1.12 GB PF usage. It seems to be focusing on one .ini file from a game that I have on the computer. Baldur’s Gate is the game and baldur.ini is the .ini file (2 KB file size). Weird, huh??? It goes to 1.76 GB PF usage and then continues without the PF usage decreasing. At 180000 files scanned the scanner just quits. Stops dead with no warning. PF usage immediately drops to 179 MB. Do not know what is the deal…
I suppose it’s not the .ini file, but rather the file that follows - probably some big archive that’s being opened (but the display isn’t refreshed before the opening actually succeeds).
Please, try to turn on the creation of the report file in avast! settings and let everything be included there (even the “OK files”). The report file will be rather big, but you should be able to see where the scanner quit - it will be the last (or rather the “one after the last” again) file in the report.
Spontaneous quitting seems like a crash to me… it would be nice to find the problematic file.
The file before the .ini file was an .iso image of the play disk. A 640 MB file. You were on the mark because once I moved the file to another partition, it scanned C:\ without any PageFile jump. Once it got to the same .iso on D:\ the PF usage jumped up but it completed the scan. Thanks for your incite and expertise.
Glad to hear it works, even though it wasn’t really a “solution”. I would like to know why avast! used to disappear for you… :-\