Behaviour Shield has been the bane of many Avast users’ lives since it was introduced. It is obviously very heavy on resources as while it heaves itself into life. Older hardware creaks under the strain until Behaviour Shield holds up a white flag (actually a little yellow alert) and collapses with exhaustion.
This misbehaviour of Behaviour Shield must be very well-known to the developers because of the not infrequent complaints about it. Cannot the developers speed the thing up a bit or give it a little more time to get moving before the inevitable happens? Maybe the start of Behaviour Shield could be delayed for a minute or two so that the chaos of system startup can calm down a bit before the obese mass of Behaviour Shield comes to lumbering life.
Why not allow users the option of a short delay for the startup of Behaviour Shield? They could be enabled to specify the number of seconds by which the start of Behaviour Shield could be delayed so that they can tune it to the needs of their particular system.
Better to start Behaviour Shield late than not at all. If this product feature is so valuable then why not help the user to achieve reliable operation of it?
Thank you for those thoughts. I would rather not delay the startup of Avast and with Windows 10 I now realise that doing so might not be necessary. I am new to using Windows 10 and am still low on the learning curve. I seem to be observing the effects of very effective startup optimisation by Windows 10. Avast Behaviour Shield has been a drag at startup by Avast but has suddenly begun to start well, including Behaviour Shield. I have been running the Windows 10 ‘Defragment and Optimise Drives’ utility and this might have been the agent of the sudden improvement. I shall have to observe further.
I guess that the Windows 10 ‘Defragment and Optimise Drives’ utility has a lot more intelligence built in as compared with the similar utility included with Windows 7.
I see that Avast allows startup to be delayed. Why can’t there be an option to delay ONLY the startup of Bevaviour Shield? Avast is pretty light on resources but Behaviour Shield is an elephant. Delaying its start is low-risk compared with delaying the whole of Avast startup. It’s common sense.
I have also had issues with behaviour shield not starting at boot up. The issue only seems to occur in the few days after a Windows update (I am on W10 1809), it has not happened for the last few days. It may be that Avast is doing some extra work in these first few days which increases the behaviour shield load.
I know as this is the Avast forum the view will be that behaviour shield is an essential component of the antivirus and should not be disabled whatever. But realistically is it doing anything that is so important that it cannot just be turned off? I am very computer savvy and have never ever been infected for the past 20 years - ie the sort of person who doesn’t really need an AV program but just has one to keep various people happy that I am ‘protected’.
Why cannot Avast monitor Behaviour Shield such that if it fails to start then AvastSvc.exe automatically repeats attempts to start it until a set number of attempts is reached when it informs the user? I am incredulous that such a simple procedure is not already in operation. Behaviour Shield has been susceptible to this behaviour for as long as it has been incorporated into Avast.
If Behaviour Shield is as valuable protection as Avast describes it to be, that it can be allowed to fail to start without additional attempts to start it is in contradiction to its purported value. The only visual clue of the failure to start is a tiny yellow allert mark on the Avast system tray icon which many would probably miss. If Behaviour Shield does not start then it is neither use nor ornament.
My previous remarks included “I am new to using Windows 10 and am still low on the learning curve. I seem to be observing the effects of very effective startup optimisation by Windows 10.”
Well, I am climbing the learning curve and now realise that Windows 10 attributes different meanings to ‘Shutdown’ and ‘Restart’ from Windows 7 and earlier versions of Windows. I have found out that ‘Shutdown’ is analogous to ‘Hibernate’ and I had noticed that after shutdown, Avast Behaviour Shield started much better. This is due to the ‘hibernate’ effect from using ‘shutdown’. Restart does a complete clean out like the old Shutdown used to do.
There is no optimisation by Windows 10 as I had mistakenly assumed.
