Avast Free Antivirus: temporary folders / files, persistent / transient caching

[Evjls]

@Lexor post:37

@Evjls post:36

I don’t know exactly how transient caching works but according to experience for years and in many different PCs: disabling Transient caching significantly reduces HDD usage (especially during the first few days after installing avast for the first time) and prolongs HDD longevity

Transient cache stores data connected to every scanned files and it’s renewed every time when PC is restarted or when a new virus definitions database is installed. So, going by this definition, if someone has a system setup that uses a lot of different files and does PC restarts quite often then this cache will probably create a lot data to write indeed.

These are the reasons that I will probably disable this cache, but I would like to know folder/file location of transient cache to consider if there are maybe other options available for me.

@Evjls post:36

lscache.dat caused constant disk usage and this is the first thing I notice in a lot of PCs/laptops I install avast. No one complains about avast slowing down their PCs since disabling it

I’m not sure I understand - so you are saying that lscache.dat is the name of the file which stores data for transient caching?
Or lscache.dat is “some other problem of disk writting”, not connected to transient caching?

@Evjls post:36

persistent caching should be enabled

That’s my opinion as well. Persistent cashing is updated only with 100% trusted files (operating system files, files signed by trusted publishers or other files covered by the avast! whitelist) so there won’t be many of them = it is ok to have it turned on.

yes I think lscache.dat is related to transient caching
I don’t care about the description, I do care about the fact that disabling it makes the HDD spin much less in ALL of my machines
since disabling it, lscache.dat never appears again in performance monitor

[system]

@Evjls post:41

yes I think lscache.dat is related to transient caching
I don’t care about the description, I do care about the fact that disabling it makes the HDD spin much less in ALL of my machines
since disabling it, lscache.dat never appears again in performance monitor

Thank you very much, Evjls, for your reply. I’ll check this “relation” myself as soon as I’ll be able to.