AvastSvc accessing internet every 10-15 secs for nothing

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

After updating to 8.0.1489 from 8.0.14?? (a recent update) AvastSvc constantly polls the internet for no reason every 10-15 secs.

I don’t have streaming, web rep or web shield active.
No other programs are accessing the internet, it’s just avast service routinely using internet data.

If I disable Avast there is no internet traffic unless I initiate it. ie. web, mail program update.

This constant polling of whatever it is by Avast is using around 1.7MB/hour (1.4MB down, 0.3MB up). That’s a lot of data for doing nothing.

This behaviour is new to 8.0.1489 for me. No previous version did this and I have made no other updates.

My questions are Why? and do I stop it?

I can deny avastsvc.exe access to the internet, but that stops me getting email, so not a good soltn.

Thanks

2

What exactly is “Internet” here?
I.e. what address?

3

igor,

Internet to me is anything that is through the modem ie. non-local.
Specifically, with nothing else running I get a new connection to mostly one of two addresses every 10-15 seconds:
r-086-043-234-077.ff.avast.com (77.234.42.86)
r-087-040-234-077.ff.avast.com (77.234.40.87)

Thanks.

4

These are an Avast Streaming updates servers. I guess.

EDIT: This was a wrong information. I’m sorry.

5

Streaming and all cloud stuff are disabled! Unless the gui lies and does it anyway?

Every 15 seconds would be overkill for that anyway. My email client is set to only check every 12 minutes.

If it is a bug with streaming preference, then will I hope it’s fixed soon.

6

It might be a bug. There shouldn’t be any connections to those servers, if the streaming updates are disabled.

7

These IPs belong to SecureLine master servers that provide information about currently available capacity of SecureLine and what servers can be connected to. This should be normally done only once each 4 hours with just about a 100 byte response. If you’re seeing it every 10 seconds it means the requests are failing for some reason and are being retried constantly. Please try uninstalling the SecureLine feature and see if it helps. We might be having problems with reaching our servers from your computer that is falsely regarded as no Internet connectivity (and thus retried too often).

8

um and how exactly is he supposed to do that? ??? you can’t uninstall part of the AV
so he gonna have to uninstall the whole thing first first

9

SecureLine as well as most of the other modules in avast can all be individually removed and re-installed.

10

I haven’t subscribed to or paid for SecureLine (the paid VPN service).
Bit confused as to why it would try to connect or fail to connect if I am not using it.

Is there a way to turn it fully off even if it hasn’t been turned on?

11

You can remove the SecureLine component via avast Installer.

SecureLine asks about servers even if you have not yet subscribed. This is something we plan to change in our next program update.

12

Thank you Deirh and craigb (and others who tried to help).

I have uninstalled Secureline using Avast installer/changer in windows add/remove program and now I have no unexpected internet traffic. This is as it was before the update to 1489.

Since I update Avast from within Avast I didn’t get any options of what to install so I never knew they were optional. I had thought that if it’s not enabled it would do nothing.

This problem is solved. I’m happy.