I’m not actually sure if it is Avast!, but my computer suddenly acts like I have barely any memory! I have 2GB. Almost anything I do (e.g. opening firefox/windows movie maker/etc.) comes up as like a 50,000+ a lot of the time even 100,000+K! Of course, that spikes my computer usage to the point where I can’t do much! I’ve been seeing a lot of answers coming up as av issues and some other people seem to have CPU usage issues with Avast! so I was just checking. I have the latest version, and I don’t seem to know how to fix this! Please help!
Hi daisy, welcome to the forum! 
Perhaps there is a conflict with other security software on your PC, that have a real time shield.
Could it be?
Nice regards
~SKY~
Personally i use process lasso to look at and take care of apps that may be consuming too much memory or cpu.There is a trial,free (with eventual nags) or pro version lifetime licence.It should show you which process is misbehaving.Of course task manger should also show you this ,however process lasso can lower the offending apps priority if required and is imo a useful app to have.
http://www.bitsum.com/index.php?force_home=1
100MB is not unusual for FF on my machines
Hi,
- Use mbam Anti malware bytes free,
- Scan computer with that and see what it finds and remove on full scan!.
Spyware will consume ram and resources.
100k ram usage is normal and should not slow down your computer with 2gb ram!
What operating system are you using and what cpu speed is your computer. - Is your swapfile in windows fixed or on system managed size?
You didn’t say which Browser you were using.
From experience I have seen Firefox go up to over 500MB and over 90% CPU usage on my computers.
High memory and CPU usage is unfortunately not unusual for Firefox.
For example right now Firefox on the computer that I am typing this on is using over 550MB of Private Bytes.
Certain addons and Plug-In Container which is part of Firefox and eat both memory and CPU like a Pac-Man. ;D
I got the same 100% CPU usage by process avastsvc.exe, so Firefox isn’t a problem, Avast is. It’s obviouse, that Avast has some bug or incompatibility, and seems that support team don’t want (or can’t) propose any solution. There are some posts in different threads, and seems that same happens also with commercial versions (for free version you can’t expect any real support).
I have W7 Ultimate 64-bit, i7 CPU and 6 GB RAM, so I really don’t like when it beheave as an i486 PC.
I have IE9, Firefox and Chrome installed (all latest versions), no additional firewall or antivirus installed. I have Adobe Acrobat Pro 8 installed (there were some reports about conflic with pdf printer, but I don’t see such problem).
Problem started after some recent update of AVAST, I haven’t seen it with v.5, but I see that some other users had it with v.5. Anyway I tried to update to latest version and definition, but it’s already up to date, so no success.
I tried to disable some parts of Avast, as was recommended in support forum, but once the process got about 100% of all 8 cores, it doesn’t go down whatever I do.
So I had to uninstall AVAST and swap to AVG. It’s a pitty, as otherwise AVAST was nice and convinient. It is interesting that on the first scan AVG had found 6 viruses, which AVAST has not found, in some old compressed installation files. May be they are false positives for marketing reasons, may be not.
If there is any solution for the problem, I would be happy to switch back to AVAST.
Regards,
Eizens
@FOG, please run task manager, find avastsvc.exe process and when it will consume 100% CPU, right-click and generate user-mode dump; please compress it and upload it on our ftp – so we’ll see what avastsvc.exe is working on… thanks