Avast generating tens of gigabytes of MDMP files

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

For the third time in as many weeks I have emptied the Avast log directory on one of the machines here at our home office because it had run out of disc space due to Avast generating almost sixty gigabytes of crash dump files.

Avast is generating these log files due to an issue with Outlook Google Calendar plugin. Disable the Google calendar plugin, Avast stops generating the log files. As disabling the Google Calendar plugin is a less desirable option than uninstalling Avast, I need to know if there is any way at all to prevent Avast from generating these crash dump files.

I am actually at the point where we are considering moving away from using Avast for protecting our systems simply because it is causing more issues and annoyances (sound effects, distracting popups, BSODs, and worst of all, hosing up the developer machines so we lose an entire day of productivity whilst we get IT to restore from backup) than any problems Avast is solving. We still have almost two and a half years left on our license to run, but frankly, pretty much everyone agrees the user experience of having Avast installed is more of a nuisance than the possibility of a virus showing up.

So… any way to turn off these crash dumps permanently along with any other logging that would be generated because of it? If the answer is “No” then I am just going to remove Avast from the system because it has become worse than useless for the person using the machine.

2

To stop the AVast report getting to such a size you need to revert to default settings - remove the ticks from the highlighted boxes

3

I don’t believe the screen settings shown by essexboy have any effect on the creation of the mdmp files as that is the manual generation of a support package, not any crash dump files.

So I can’t see a way of disabling the crash dumps.

I would suggest starting a support ticket and or possibly uploading a selection of these recent mdmp files zipped to the avast ftp location for analysis.

Give the zip file you are uploading a unique name (e.g. forumusername-mem-dump.zip, etc), so they can identify it. It might not be a bad idea to create a text file (readme.txt) with any relevant information, avast topic URL, user name, etc. etc. in the zip file. Not to mention posting the name of the file you uploaded in the topic, this acts as another searchable reference.

Upload the zip file to the ftp server ftp://ftp.avast.com/incoming, you don’t have read permission for this location so you won’t see the uploaded file.