Last night my Internet connection didn’t work for a while and I decided to listen to some music. I started Winamp and I noticed that it took an unusual long time to start the program. When I tried other programs, they also took a much longer time to start.
While there is no direct explanation why a local program would start slower with no internet connection, I got the idea that it could be Avast, trying to verify the legimity of the program I wanted to run. With no connection alive at that moment, it caused a huge delay.
To verify my assumptions I uninstalled Avast and after a reboot the system was much much faster. The delays were gone, but it was also even faster than before. I think this behaviour is more present since Avast 2015. In my opinion the performance impact is too much, you can notice it also well if you use an SSD, normally programs open very fast, but there is somehow a small delay (also with an internet connection) with Avast running.
I like Avast very much, for the GUI, it’s features and I would continu to use it, but for me the performance impact is simply too big. I hope the developers of the program will look to improve the performance of Avast in the future.
