Avast Memory Usage

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

First off if by chance there are any moderators or admins here that are directly associated with ALWIL please pass on the message that I’m a very grateful long time user of Avast and I use my computer with high confidence because of the great protection that I get from Avast despite the fact that I use the home edition. I’m legally blind and on a fixed income so you can imagine how pleased I am to be able to get to use such high quality software free of charge.

Like I mentioned, I’m a long time user and I’ve just noticed recently that Avast appears to be using a large amount of memory.
ashServ.exe 92,348 K
ashMaiSv.exe 34,108 K
ashWebSv.exe 33,864 K
The only thing that I could think to do is to turn off resources that aren’t being used like Instant Messaging protection and the P2P shield
but those won’t draw resources unless those programs are in use right?
As far as the other types of protection (Web Shield, Internet Mail, Standard etc) I have the Sensitivity levels set to High for all of them. I understand that it may be overkill or unnecessary to do that but I am willing to wait a few extra seconds for Avast to scan things coming in and out of my computer and for even opening programs and files. The alternative to that is taking a chance that I could initiate something that could compromise the security of my data and I’m not really willing to do that especially because I download a lot of programs for testing from the Internet on a daily basis and I use Mozilla Thunderbird for an e-mail client and that is always open and I receive on average 50+ e-mails per day so those and the downloaded programs all need to be scanned before I do anything and I trust Avast.
So the main point is, is there any way to reduce the amount of memory that Avast consumes without having to compromise the safety and integrity of my data?

Just one more thing that I do hope gets passed along is that the Avast site starting with the homepage does not validate according to W3C standards meaning that the homepage has errors (14 HTML errors and 11 CSS ones) that prevents the page from being properly accessible.
An example that you can actually see is to go to the front page and enlarge the text size (Ctrl and + or - or Cmd and + or - on Mac) and you’ll see that the text becomes a jumbled mixed up mess that is unreadable.

Thanks sincerely for your time.

2

The Virtual Memory is what counts (you need to show this column, hidden by default into the Task Manager).

Yes, you’re right.

Set Standard Shield to Normal level is the best balance between performance and protection.
Don’t worry, it’s safe.

Oh, I’m not from the staff, just an user like you :wink:

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What were/had you been doing when you noticed this as during browsing and scanning these will peak and after a while will go back down. I have just taken an image of mine whilst writing this post and it is relatively low.

There are more serious hogs on my system firefox as you can see.

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Nothing in particular and as I just mentioned I was referring to the wrong memory values anyway.

There are more serious hogs on my system firefox as you can see.
Ya that's a shame about Firefox. I've been a volunteer, contributor, and advocate for Mozilla and its products and projects for about 3 1/2 years now and I'm a bit disappointed that I still have memory issues after Firefox 3 was supposed to address them. It doesn't mean that I'd dump Firefox I've just had to cut the amount of add-ons that I use in half which makes a difference but not really a huge one and if I miss any of the add-ons I just run another instance of Firefox with a different profile that oddly enough the 2 (or more) simultaneous instances of Firefox usually (but not always) uses less combined memory than running one instance of Firefox with about 50 add-ons. Go figure.
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OK, welcome to the forums.