Do Streaming Updates/Cloud Services use much bandwidth?

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

Hi guys,

My ISP monitors and restricts the amount of data I can download/upload each month. This doesn’t usually bother me and I mostly use internet for gaming, which doesn’t use much data.
I turned my computer on at about 16:00 today and was told to upgrade to Avast 7, so I did. I then played a couple of games of Battlefield 3, and watched a couple of game trailers on youtube.
When I checked my data usage just now, I’ve used 1.2 Gb!
Normally, I wouldn’t expect to have used more than around 400mb - 600mb in total.

I checked my windows update history to see if any updates had been automatically applied in the background, but they haven’t. I also didn’t need to update any other software.

I was just wondering if this spike in data usage might be caused by the new streaming and cloud systems employed by Avast 7’s realtime protection? What are the disadvantages of disabling the cloud and streaming services?

Thanks for any help!

2

Cloud services use extremely little bandwidth. You can check the size of the files: \defs\XXXXXXX-stream folders (if any).
They’re not only incremental but very small releases of the virus definitions.
For sure not 600 to 800 Mb at all!

3

Thanks for the reply.

I thought that might be the case, but I wasn’t sure as I know you can get some cloud-based AV software like Trend Micro Titanium, which I assume sends file info into the cloud to be analysed?

I have a feeling the extra data usage was my girlfriend running windows updates on her laptop while I was out :slight_smile:

4

Sure. But we’re talking about kb and not Mb…