com.avast.MacAvast.MAD staying at 100% all day after today's update

Avast Mac Security
1

I installed Avast on our Macs about a month ago after the recent spate of cross-platform Java trojans.
It never used much of our machines’ CPUs (2 MacBook Pros, MacMini Server and MacPro) until today’s update - 7.0 (38446). For the past 10 hours Avast on my MacBook Pro has been eating 100% of one of the machine’s 4 cores causing the fans to max out.
I’ve force-quit com.avast.MacAvast.MAD several times (as suggested in several posts on this problem since 2008) and after the process restarts itself it ges right back to 100%. The MBP has neither a VM nor an iPhoto library - both of which are pointed out as prime causes for this runaway process.
The MBP is still usable today - avast is monopolizing only one of the four cores (unlike when we were using ClamXav) - but the fans running full tilt all day is annoying, and most days I’m using Adobe CS applications full time which are all CPU hogs.

2

Hallo,
well, program update has nothing in common with the mentioned process - it’s part of daily VPS updates. So, which particular version is causing this overhead?

Regards,
pc

UPDATE: 13030801 VPS tested right now - and no problem found. Please, try to switch off particular shields, probably one of them - fileshield, might cause a flow of request to the scanning service. Maybe because another process accesses them - isn’t mds indexing service running just in parallel?

regards,
pc

3

The fact that Avast had been a quiet low-CPU background application since it was installed on this machine several weeks ago and then suddenly blew up only after the update seemed pretty accusatory. The fact that force-quitting it multiple times through the day with it soon reappearing and pegging at 100% CPU use made it seem again that it was the update.

I left the MBP running overnight and when I checked it the next morning it was still at 100% with the fan howling. I Force-Quit it again and it has been behaving itself ever since.
Filtering the Activity Monitor for “avast” shows there are 2 co.avast.MacAvast.MAD processes running - a 32bit and 64 bit. The 32bit is currently eating up 0.2% of the CPU and the 64bit is at 0.0%

If it blows up again I’ll update this with a full list of proceses.

4

Hallo,
just a technical note - program update doesn’t modify your virus database - usually, your current (probably latest one) database is just accepted as-is. Only in few cases, when your current database is invalid/unusable, update might return to the failsafe version (saved upon previous update), for a while - but, with the very next update, it’s replaced by the latest one. That’s why I need the VPS number - this describes the scanning service version which is used at the moment (program version isn’t significant here).

regards,
pc

5

Not sure where the “VPS” is in the Mac version.
The About Avast window says “virus definitions version: 13031300”

6

I came looking to see if others have the same problem – runaway com.avast.MacAvast.MAD

I do not have the skills to look for fixes. I’d guess the problem is very widespread.
Happens to me occasionally – maybe once in two weeks – completely unclear why.

Only solution is to shut down and restart

7

you might try turning Web Rep off. Its an extension in your browser

When I ran with Web Rep extension on in Chrome, starting up used 1.8GB of memory!
It slowly returned to normal, 20mb

By disabling the web rep extension in Chrome, the program starts up and uses 20mb

I am not saying that is your problem, but it sounds similar

8

com.avast.MacAvast.MAD starts eating up all my CPU power after my laptop is idle for a few minutes… once I click a mouse or hit the keyboard it stops. It is quite annoying as my laptop’s cooling fans go to full and stay on if ever I leave my computer. I’ve been looking for a solution other than uninstalling avast… which I will likely do if I cannot solve this. I’m not sure if it’s the culprit, but this behavior started at some point after the last program update I ran.