Behaviour Shield Bugged - ram and cpu usage rendering system unusable

I’ve come to choose avast AV free as my antivirus because of its reputation as being accurate and lightweight. So far it worked pretty well for me for the greater part of a year.
A couple of months back though, its behaviour shield irregularely started to consume more and more of my laptops resources, up to the point where it was barely usable and even the most basic programs didn’t react.
The spikes seem independent of my activities, and don’t resolve until i reboot the computer. Disabling the behaviour shield on the runnning system didn’t work consistently, which may be due to the slow responsiveness of the overloaded system, as it actually only halted the task once, 20 minutes after disabling it in the control center.
I’ve already performed a full repair through avast’s inbuilt tool, which resolved the problem for the moment, but just for it to reappear a couple of days later.
As of my understanding, the tool fails to free ram and accumulates ram usage until there is no free memory left.
When this is happening, CPU usage spikes to up to 50% as well.
I’ve added a screenshot from today below, showing a ram usage of astounding 2.6 GB. It’s been at 1 GB this morning, and slowly climbed up from there.

For now I’ve disabled the feature, but I’d be happy to see this problem resolved, and being able to use it again.
Thanks in advance
ryu2k

https://i.ibb.co/hMjjshr/behaviourshield2.png

Are you running a Samsung SSD with Samsung Magician software installed? Do you have RAPID Mode enabled? If so, disable RAPID Mode and reboot.

I had the same symptoms (out of system memory and system halt several times (17x) since October 4, 2018) but none since this was disabled after April 9, 2019.

Sure the system runs a little slower but it [is] still way faster than with the original HDD it came with which has been replaced by Samsung SSD.

No system hangs since April 9, 2019. The reason for the hangs were simple: RAPID mode uses some system memory and avast would compete for use of the same and the system would run out of memory (3GB) and hang. Way out was to use Task Manager and restart Windows Explorer, worked most of the time. Else, force shut down by holding the power button and turning back on later.

If this applies please try. You can always turn RAPID mode back on later.

Hi ryu2k,

we found some issues which can cause high memory usage. The fix’ll be available in the next version 19.6.

The CPU usage may be connected to the memory usage but we cannot be sure without the process memory dump.

To produce the memory dump:

  1. go to the settings and select Troubleshooting
  2. Disable the Self-Defense
  3. run https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/process-explorer using an Administrator account
  4. select the aswidsagent.exe and press Right button. You should select Create Dump → Create full dump in the Menu
  5. zip the created dump and share the zip with us

Thanks,
PDI