Avast is taking 15 seconds to scan a thumbnail.jpg file

Avast Mac Security
1

Full system scans usually take 40 minutes or less on my MacBook.
Yesterday I had to abort after three hours.
The problem seems to have been triggered when I asked iTunes to add an external music directory. This directory is stored in the cloud and it has 77 tracks amounting to 2.24GB. iTunes moves a copy of this to my MacBook’s drive.
A second factor which has to be present is that TimeMachine has to take a snapshot.
Avast is trying to process thumbnail.jpg files as shown in the attached screen shot and it is doing it very slowly. I measured about 15 seconds for each thumbnail.jpg.

The problem goes away in Avast

  1. if all of the files are deleted from within iTunes and are thus deleted from my disk.
  2. I wait until the next morning when TimeMachine does a regular backup and deletes interim snapshots.

It returns as soon as I want to play anything in iTunes and TimeMachine does a backup.

2

Hello,
thank you for reporting this issue. We will try to replicate and fix it.
Kind regards,
Ondrej Kolacek

3

Hello,

There are two issues: first we do not correctly detect the time machine volume and we scan it by default even when the checkbox “Scan all Time Machine backups” is unchecked. This will be fixed in the 13.6 version.

But this does not fix the actual issue of scan taking too long for the case when the checkbox is checked; it seems that for some of the files in the local snapshot, read operation takes 15 seconds to start when the file is read for the first time. This can at this moment only be worked around by unchecking “Scan all Time Machine backups” checkbox.

Kind regards,
Ondrej Kolacek