avast! file system shield delays apps opening by two seconds

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

When I run an application for the first time after booting into Windows 7, avast! doesn’t let it open for about two seconds. I confirmed by temorarily disabling the file system shield, rebooting, and trying to run applications again. Now they came up almost instantly. I started noticing this yesterday, though maybe I just wasn’t paying attention before. I have an i7-2600K with 8 GB of memory on an SSD, so avast! shouldn’t take 2 seconds to scan a couple of files.

EDIT: I used Process Monitor to track what avast! is doing behind the scenes. At 5:56:04.46 it read some information about the executable that I ran (tcc.exe). From 04.46 to 04.96 (half a second), avast! wasn’t doing anything. At that point it just read something from avast5.ini and apparently went idle again. One second later it finally did the scan and then let the tcc.exe process start at 05.96, a full 1.5 seconds after it was supposed to start. I saved the Process Monitor log if anyone from avast! wants to look at it. I can’t tell what it’s doing during those long “idle” times.

2

Try disabling the Reputation Services and see if it changes anything.

3

Yeah, that was the problem. Thanks.

4

Igor… Any addressing of this situation in the future? I mean, any improvement we can expect?

5

Hard to say… depends on the network connectivity, the particular started executables, and possibly other factors.
The server infrastructure will be improved, but the queries (if performed) need some time - though 2 seconds is weird, it looks a bit like the requests are not getting through.

6

Cache will work in this situation?

7

Yes, there’s a cache, the received data are remembered for some time.
But I don’t know how it behaves when the request actually fails, i.e. when no data is received.