Avast just started to have an increased CPU usage.

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
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Recently I have been monitoring the Task Monitor as my browser Firefox is using a lot of resources, primarily RAM and not very much CPU,
but whilst it comes back down when I don’t have a lot of tabs open.

However whist monitoring this I have noticed the high CPU usage by Avast.

The title says it all ordinarily my Avast CPU usage has been very low - Previously, it did spike at times but comes back down, however it has been sat at 30% or higher for some time. The process responsible for this is the Avast Software Analyser aswblDSAgent.

I have also noted the return of the Red X ‘You are unprotected’ in the Avast Tray icon (so I guess this is related) analysing the software because of this (?).
I did a system restart to get rid of the Red X, which it did for a while but returned.

I had a previous topic related to this - https://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=328261.0 - but I didn’t notice a CPU increase.

Just went into the Avast Notifications which stated the Behaviour Shield was off - I hadn’t disabled it.

I have turned it back on (no Red X ‘You are unprotected’) so going to monitor after a restart and see if the high CPU is still present (currently still just under 30%).

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As I mentioned “Avast Notifications which stated the Behaviour Shield was off” when I had this ‘You are unprotected’ there was no indication what component was disabled.
I enabled it and did a system restart (no repair).

I rebooted and checked to ensure the ‘Behaviour Shield’ was enabled but it was, but CPU for the ‘Avast Software Analyser aswblDSAgent’ was still high.
A further restart seemed to resolve that.

I continue to monitor it with the Task Monitor window open, so far no recurrence, fingers crossed.

So far no recurrence of the

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David, I get high Avast (as well as Windows components) CPU and high disk usage for several mins after startup, but therefafter it calms down. Is the high Avast CPU load with nothing else running, or is it with Firefox also running?

Last time you did a Repair Avast and understand that helped your “unprotected” issue. Have you tried doing that again?
If all else fails, maybe its time for you to do a clean remove/re-install of Avast.