My MB Pro started getting noisy, the fan wouldn’t stop for about 1h until I checked my running processes and found MacAvastHelper cosntantly at 100% CPU for a long time (I guess the whole hour)
After force-closing it all is well again 
see here for screen shot please: http://screencast.com/t/co4NHIkkYO3
and now a few hours later it was com.Avast.MacAvast.Mad going rogue, had to actually restart, couldn’t do anything anymore 
This is still an issue in the release version (7.0 (36770)).
It was reported by many users in the beta thread, but no one from Avast replied or took the beta testers up on their offers for logs or other diagnostics.
Disappointing to see it released with a known issue like this.
Hallo,
it’s not this daemon, probably, who’s the primary cause. Some application might modify one big file repeatedly, or, modify more smaller files steadily. This leads to the need to scan the newly-placed content again and again, and, this might cause overhead.
Solution would be to start complete logging (ad admin, go to /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.avast.daemon.plist, edit this file - the 0x00000002 replace with 0xffffffff). Then, reboot, and when the cause shows up again, in your /var/log/avastdaemon.log will be the cause, now pretty visible. Anyway, we 're interested in the culprit, when in doubts, please, send us the log (compressed, probably tail -n1000000 cut).
regards,
pc
Any word on whether the program update today solves this issue?
There were some changes in the helper that may fix it, but as we could not reproduce this issue, we can not guarantee that…
for me now,
/Library/Application Support/Avast/files/vps/com.avast.MacAvast.MAD
is running at 100% making everything run extremely sluggish. I am about to uninstall Avast again
I’m on 7.0 (37028) with Virus Defs 12052900
between the above process, mdworker and mds, my CPU is constantly busy…
PID COMMAND %CPU TIME #TH #WQ #POR #MREG RPRVT RSHRD RSIZE VPRVT VSIZE PGRP PPID STATE UID FAULTS COW MSGSENT MSGRECV SYSBSD SYSMACH CSW PAGEINS USER
131- com.avast.MacAva 93.4 24:48.02 57/1 0 88 199+ 63M+ 5412K 56M+ 145M+ 769M+ 60 60 running 0 21696286+ 215 1790+ 895+ 690579+ 1553+ 835460+ 848110 root
35 mds 64.7 02:47.95 7 6 108- 494+ 377M- 5032K 415M+ 5303M+ 7699M+ 35 1 stuck 0 1699821+ 668 110081+ 60485+ 301395+ 67862+ 197705+ 40717 root
499 mdworker 26.5 01:23.36 3/1 1 52 124+ 22M+ 10M 78M+ 126M+ 2514M+ 499 1 running 502 608481+ 509 8753 2662 126652+ 6406 87672+ 554 mathias
This is still happening for me with app 37028 and definitions 12052901, and it’s with com.avast.MacAvast.MAD.
Super-high CPU consumption slowing down my computer, causing my fans to run, etc. Can’t use the file shield, which renders the program largely worthless.
com.avast.MacAvast.MAD is the engine, not the helper app. This may or may not be an issue as some files simply need not negligible CPU time to be scanned. If you think it is an issue, please use a separate forum thread for reporting it.
Hallo, some badly written software (typically, USB-scanner bundled utilites etc.) might modify your filesystem repeatedly.
The fact that your fileshield’s on/off state influences the overall performance of the machine is a sign of this problem.
Open ActivityMonitor, sort the processes by their CPU column, and with high probability, you will see the culprit. It’s also wise to turn off avast’s shields to get rid of com.avast.MacAvast.MAD activity, which is indeed great, but as a consequence only.
In the case of no succesful find, we can increase logging abilities of our shields in the next update, making such identification easier.
Regards,
pc
Checking out the logs, they pointed at the culprit for me. It was my parallels VM hard disk.
Perhaps some simple advice would be for anyone using VMs to have Avast installed on the VM, then remove the folder containing the VM’s hard disk from the Mac Avast Filesheilds (via settings…Fieldsheilds…Advanced…Exclude)
In my case it seems overly interested in iPhoto.
Specifically:
/Users//Pictures/iPhoto Library/Database/apdb/
The program are running, but I’m not importing any images, browsing or manipulating images. I guess photo stream does some background work, but do the daemon really need to be that aggressive?
Would it really have beed such a security issue to scan a file which changes continuously on a periodic basis or at least non-constant instead?