Yesterday I decided to look for an alternative for my current licensed F-Secure product
hoping that new techniques might make things less bloated and faster.
I went for Avast as free alternative.
The install went fine so I decided to do a full scan to see how it will react on false positives as I code a lot of stuff myself that triggered antivirus software sometimes.
Here is where the dissapointment in Avast is starting.
I started the scan yesterday around 21:00, it’s now 12:00 and it’s still at 0%.
I see a small dot at the top of the circle so it’s progressing slowly if that red circle needs to be completed.
If I do some quick math and hope that it will make 2% today this means that it will need 50 days for a system scan?
When I look at the default settings the scan all files option is disabled although it seems to scan everything due to this “check file type by content” option that’s on by default. What the point of the first option then?
ok, the system is quite old (12 years?) but it’s still a 2.6GHz machine and it only has 120Gb as main drive which is not even full but the speed of the scan is not really acceptable.
Does it keep any file hash info to improve the next full scan speed?
yes, it fully removed everything without problems, did a reboot before installing avast aswell.
I just noticed that it was scanning a USB drive (and that’s USB 1.0 or 1.1 on that computer = slow),
so my 3 1TB usb drives are not seen as swappable media
and where included in the “All drives” option that the full scan has.
I changed this to system disk or something and restarted the scan again.
I see it’s processing .txt files and other “safe” extentions although I selected scan by extension.
@Pondus: thanks for the link, I’ll go through that now.
I enabled the persistent cache and restarted the full scan again.
It seems that most of the time gets wasted on populating the files it needs to scan.
took more than an hour before it actually started scanning the files.
The scanning seems to progress fine tho, it’s at 12% after less than 10 minutes.
Maybe a file scan in a seperate file scan queue thread during the recursive tree scan could improve thing in my case.