I would like to see some speed improvement in Standard Shield provider

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

Dear Forum and avast! developers:

I’m still happy with this anti-malware solution because it’s managed thru the time to be very balanced when protecting the computer but using few system resources. Of course it would be better if it used fewer resources, but generally speaking it runs well.

BUT (hell, why there’s allways a but? 8)) what I really would like to see is an improvement in the realtime file scanner. Sure it is fast than much other AVs but lately I checked NOD and Avira solutions -my subscription will end in a month and half- and got stunned with their lightning fast scan yet fewer system resources usage and extremely high detection rates - it’s evident there’s large chunks of plain assembler.

I really do like those solutions as well as avast! and I think I will finally stand in avast! lines but as I said I would really really really appreciate any speed improvement you could make on the realtime file scanner provider.

avast! still rules, this forum is plain GREAT and I’m a true believer a great product deserves loyalty from its users. I will really appreciate if you could take note on this topic for future avast! releases.

Thanks a lot!!

2

Just a couple of questions …

  1. How do you know which files the alternatives are really scanning (as opposed to ignoring)
  2. How are you actually measuring the differences

I can turn off the avast Standard Shield and I am not able to notice any difference in the responsiveness of my system so I am keen to hear how others do.

3

Hey, hello alanrf, it’s been quite a time since last time we chatted =)

Well, I will talk about my personal experience: I have a P4 Prescott 2.4 w/1 GB ram, 1mb cache, 600mhz bus, a nVidia video card w/256mb, a SB Audigy 2 sound card, 1 HD IDE and 2 HD SATA and 2 DVD W+ (a LiteOn and a LG), the mobo is a Gigabyte w/ Intel chipset. At this time I have connected (USB) two ink-jet printers one of them with scanner integrated, a playing device (a pad) and a bluetooth dongle and also the cablemodem via ethernet (which I recommend).

It’s no doubt any PC computer runs like a sweet summer day when Windows is just installed. But as time goes on and because Windows is crap -compared with any Unix-based Linux distribution- you will find your PC will delay more and more seconds to boot, to launch apps, to get directories -folders- listed and so on.

Off course you can defragment hard disks and memory, clean-up and defragment registry, tweak cache and registry, put temp folders and pagedisk file on different hard disks and schedule a complete system manteinance once a week to ensure your system is at peak performance, but please note the extra money you have to pay for all that applications that not come with the original Windows CD, the knowledge, experience grade and time you need to set-up all of that.

Let’s upgrade then to SP1… mmm, it’s evident this system is getting slower… mmm. Say, you really don’t install SP1 until one of your appliactions you badly need makes it mandatory to ‘upgrade’ to SP1… oh, WTF, well, okay… grrrr.
Then the same way you have to install SP2, Arrghhh!! not again… that leaves your computer slower than a turtle in the name of security (like the war on terrorism, let’s bomb the whole planet as a prevention 8)).

Say, time pass on and you finally ‘forget’ how much fast XP was the very first time you installed it without all security patches.

But when you finally decided to install a resident antivirus/antimalware is the worst!! Your PC already crawled after installing SP2 compared when it was a clean first installation, now you have a program that more or less do this: you launch any application and a security guard yells STOP! Credentials! mmm, let me check if you are not in the Wanted list… mm I guess not, you may pass! Oh wait!!! All those DLLs come along with you? STOP! I need to check every one of them! The guard then checks all of them and finally let them pass. So the program you launched is in memory. You do your things but when you wan’t to save your work the guards stops everyone again and start all over again. The same way when program ‘exits’ memory… WTF!!

(That’s why is so important to have an antimalware that do it’s job efficiently - as avast! do).

Well, having my system at top performance as it can be the only way to increase performance I have is to turn off the antivirus, not a very clever choice for certain. These days there’s so much junk on internet that you know you can get a ‘cold’ just clicking the wrong link.
But what I can do for instance is at least stop checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking the same files again and again and againg and again and again and again and again because we all know, everybody knows they’re clean, for God’s sake!

And believe me you will find a very noticeable speed boost when stoping or pausing the file realtime scanner or at least directing the scanner to just scan programs and scripts when they’re launched but not all the files created/modified and so on. The increase in speed is very noticeable indeed, as is very noticeable too when deactivating the Web Shield provider specially if you have 30+ tabs open in Opera and a lot more in Seamonkey or Firefox and programs allways connected to internet in the background as Klipfolio for example.

But please let’s be realistic, nowadays is mandatory in working environments to have an antimalware solution; like in the well known Aesop’s fable The hare and the turtle is allways preferible go a little slow and finish. People dies everyday crashing their cars while trying to gain some minutes or even seconds driving foolishly as crazy.

So, to answer the question #1 I tell you I first switched back all parameters in avast! as it was out-of-the-box (or out of the web I shall say ;)) and played with my system, worked and so on. Then do the same with NOD and Avira… and the results were wide evidents: those both solutions, even with the “Check every bit that’s flowing in this system” option activated were sustantially faster than avast! in the Normal scan mood.
May be you can write to those companies an ask them if they’re scanning or just ignoring the data 8) but let me tell you in gooth faith they’re actually a very very good security applications, they do the same avast! but faster :slight_smile:
As for quesiton #2, I really didn’t have a stop-watch at hand to check times :wink: but believe me when I say they’re really lightning fast, because they really are lightning fast.

For instance my downloads folder’s filled right now with .exes, .dlls, movies, pictures, music and so on, with 29,1 gb, 25212 files and 2763 folders take AGES to open with avast! if the Standard Shield is set to Normal (as opossed as “Personalizado” or ‘Custom’ or whatever it reads in the english version of avast!) when the same folder browsed with either of the other two solutions opens in a snap. And yes, they DO scan the same things avast! do.

As I said at the begining I’m a very happy user of avast! and have been very happy with it for almost 3 years and half, with NEVER having any incident (i.e. security breach) and only one or two software glitch in all that time.

But the speed of those two suites (as opposed to mammoths as CA’s, Symantec’s, Trend’s, Norman, Panda, MKS, BitDef and even Kasp., you name it) is really freaking fast. What I tell is it would be good to see avast! improve in that way.

avast! is already a fine product and for any of you in this forum that goes now and then to CNET’s Download.com you’ll find avast! is silently making it to the top.
A year or so ago I was wondering how people didn’t know about avast! and how CNET’s Download didn’t even mention it. Now those people that finally ‘discovered’ avast! don’t cease to tell how good is it and how much it impressed them - in good hour boys ::slight_smile:

I hope developer team take note about this and put hands at work. avast! is also known for listening to it’s users, so it would be great to see this nice product get better in that way.

I recall now an article I read some time ago where an executive at Symantec said “we hear our users high and loud and we are going to make this [2008] the best version ever”… HAHAHAHAHAHAHA, half planet was sending them to f… up because their horrible slow and monstrous Norton Antivirus, and that guy say those words so proud… COME ON!!! damn corporate greed

By the way, for resident protection I run only avast! Pro (tweaked to my taste) and Ghost Security Suite’s RegDefend, a nice program writed almost all in assembler that takes care of a good part of Windows core security and consumes 00% cycles - but may weight up to 12,5 mb in ram because the policies tables. Also download and inmunize the browsers once a week or two with Spybot’s and SpywareBlaster. Also make a check with Spybot once a month but it never find a thing. Also use DropMyRights (thank you DavidR!!!) to launch browsers which I use the portable versions of Opera and FF - Seamonkey is my preferred and default installed browser. Lastly, I downloaded a lot time ago Harden-It from yasc.net which I recommend because it tweaks the registry and don’t need to stay in memory. I also use the built-in XPsp2 firewall beacuse all of them take a lot of resources, may be Jetico or Look’n Stop are the lightest but people here in these forums prefer Comodo’s Free Firewall. I surf dangerous sites on regular basis and never, NEVER have been infected with anything. I don’t run any other CPU & memory hogging realtime security application, nor any sandbox or any anti-spyware. From time to time I scan my PC with another antivirus solutions -my friends have installed other antivirus and I run scans from their PCs- and never found anything. I think avast! + the nice people in this forums + a little of common sense should last for long.

Hope this make things clear, alanrf.

Best,
Martín

4

Martin,

nice to chat with you again too.

I think you you maybe doubted the sincerity of my questions - I think anyone who reads my posts knows that I like to push the avast team as much as any other contributor here - even though like you I am, at heart, a supporter of the product.

I thank you for the long and detailed response to my questions - I really did not mean to make you write so much.

You have certainly explained why systems (like so many of us) tend to expand with age but I hope you will not be offended when I say that I do not think that you have responded at all to the two very specific questions I put to you. I am looking for technical details that I too can test and measure and compare with your findings.

Sincerely,

Alan

5

I echo Alan’s comments and I have a relatively old system now it is no speed freak as my signature attests I even tweaked my CPU to wring a little more out of it. But, I really don’t see any appreciable difference and that is where things fall down, our appreciations as opposed to actual timings.

If we were able to easily measure these differences with and without an AV running the differences would ‘certainly for me’ be milliseconds or fractions of a second, something the our human brain just can’t compare.

As far as clutter goes, I started out with win98, upgraded to win98se and then upgraded to winxp pro, all without a clean install so I would say mine would/should be a cluttered as it gets (if I did nothing about it). I have changed HDDs from the one I first had with win98, but I use Drive Image and when I got a new HDD I cloned my old drive onto the new.

I regularly check and defrag my partitions if required, I also clean up the registry and remove old programs, etc. this helps with overall system performance and that too would have an impact on the performance of your AV.

I also use on-demand anti-spyware scanners SuperAntiSpyware and previously AVG-AS now their quick scan wasn’t a patch on the avast Standard scan. avast 11 minutes, avg-as 13 and SAS 19 minutes all for a closely compatible scan sensitivity. Not only that the total number of files scanned by avast was greater. SAS does scan parts of the registry which avast doesn’t but I doubt that that accounts for the difference.

So I don’t see a huge issue with avasts scanning speed and the scanning engine has been optimised for core 2 duo processors. So Alwil do care about performance, it isn’t something that they can ignore. They have continued to add more unpackers, which depending on your sensitivity settings would have an impact. Add to that there will always be a compromise between performance and protection.

6

Well, I can assure you that the differences in speed are certainly not caused by some program being written in assembler, and another one in something else (unless it’s Visual Basic or Java ;)).
The reasons are, for example:

  • today’s compilers are able to generate code that runs almost the same speed as hand-written assembly code (sometimes even faster)
  • today’s CPUs usually don’t need that much optimization - they have their own ways to execute code faster
  • the main avast! scanning code was also optimized in assembler (though the speeup wasn’t as big as you might expect)
  • nobody writes big parts of code in assembler these days - it’s almost impossible to maintain, and takes a lot of time to write

What I’m curious about, however, is what you wrote about the slow entering of folder(s) with avast! default settings. It’s quite strange, I must say… can you tell us what did you change in avast! configuration to avoid the slow opening?
Additionally, you might (in the original configuration) enable the “Show detailed into on performed action” option to see what’s being scanned when you enter the folder.

7
(unless it's Visual Basic or Java)

ajajjajajajajaj ;D

David, Alan, Igor, wholeheartly thank you for your time.

Dear Igor:

I’M VERY ASHAMED!!! (what a moron I’am!!!) :-[ :-[ :-[ :-[ :-[

Actually it took ages to open that folder when using the thumbnails view but otherwise it opens instantly… err sorry, I’m a stupid :-[ :-[ :-[ :-[ :-[ :-[ :-[ :-[ :-\ :-\ :-\ :-\ :‘( :’( :‘( :’( :cry: :-X :-X :-X :-X :-[ :-[

;D

But believe it or not (as Replay used to say) I still find NOD and Avira faster than avast! at log-on and in the daily usage. May be ‘fast’ is not the correct word -I figure now- but the system feels more responsive while using those solutions than when using avast!.
Obviously this is very subjetive but actually applications seems to launch faster, folders to open faster and so on.
For example with that download (dump!) folder explorer shows files icons way faster when testing NOD or Avira than with avast!.

Nevermind, I know that’s really very subjetive, I’m sticking with you people for the time to come and I’m very happy some people I told about youu have adopted avast! Pro as their AV choice.

By the way thanks a lot for that mini guidelines about contemporary coding scene.

10 Print : Print : “Regards!” : Print “=)” : Goto 10

8

Dear Igor and avast! developers:

What do you think about adding a hash-MD5-CRC check only to already scanned and ‘clean’ files? This way, any given file that was previously scanned and considered ‘clean & safe’ could be added to a database so next time avast! needs to check that file the only thing it should do is check the file’s checksum… I think this could give a significant boost to the realtime scanner…

Only two comments that comes to my mind about this:

  1. I don’t know if modern malware authors have a way to actually change infectable files without affecting it’s checksum… if so, well, that’s a very bad thing but if it’s not then I think implementation of above may be a good thing to have in mind.

  2. I think Kasp. already did something like this in it’s KAV and KIS 5 and above… how do this work for them? May be Kasp. is a very good product, but it is a bloated one.

I think one of the things we avast! users love most about your product is it’s very conception: it is fast (altough it can improve), it’s very reliable, is light on resources, it’s clean, nice and simple. Personally I like a lot all the GUI, the way you can customize it but yet keep it interface very simple. I love the color set, and I like a lot the welcome screens.

YOU ARE THE BEST!!! Congratz on an excellent work!!!

Best regards,
Martín

9

Well I did a have a stop-watch! http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=29360.msg241712#msg241712

And I’m just trialling ESET SS suite on the same machine and with the default settings it’s a staggeringly fast 21 seconds.

Llike Martin, I’m very happy with Avast and do not believe that posting an observation is to imply criticism of the excellent product that it is.
Also, my endorsement of the speed with which ESET SS scans executables is not to say that it is without fault.

cheers :slight_smile:

10

cool 8)

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Updated. See strikethrough and underline

Comparison of time taken to run ‘OpenOffice.org Writer 2.2’ from fresh boot with various AV (all free for home use except CA). Deliberately used slow PC (SIS630, Celeron 850mhz, 256MB RAM) so as to clearly see differences. All AV at default settings. Each timed twice (reboot in between) and times averaged. (They were the same or very close anyway.)

Comodo AV 2.0 Beta, 103 seconds
PC Tools AV 3.1, 40 seconds
Spyware Terminator with CLAMAV plugin, 37 seconds
PC Tools AV 4.0.0.18 (beta), 34 seconds
Avast! 4.7 , 33 seconds
CA Antivirus 8.4, 29 seconds
AVG (Antivirus) 7.5 , 27 seconds
AOL Active Virus Shield, 26 seconds No Longer Available
Avira PEC, 25 seconds
Avast! 4.7.1098, 24 seconds
NO AV installed, 20 seconds

Now I’ll have to retest all of them ::slight_smile:

12

I appreciate a lot your work Vladimyr, because you make reality one more time that old proverb that says:

“Improve only comes from the private sector” ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

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Hi Martosurf

Surprised by how much faster Avast 4.7.1098 and PC Tools 4.0.0.18 beta appeared to be compared to earlier testing, I’ve now retested some other free AVs. All were faster than before and I was scratching my head as to why when the test PC hardware is unchanged.
Then I remembered, about 2 weeks ago I was trying out a couple of defrag programs on the same machine. At least one of them must have done some good! ;D

Comparison of time taken to run ‘OpenOffice.org Writer 2.2’ from fresh boot with various AV (all free for home use except CA). Deliberately used slow PC (SIS630, Celeron 850mhz, 256MB RAM) so as to clearly see differences. All AV at default settings. Each timed twice (reboot in between) and times averaged. (They were the same or very close anyway.)

PC Tools AV 4.0.0.18 (beta), 34 seconds
Avast! 4.7.1098, 24 seconds
AVG (Antivirus) 7.5 , 19 seconds
Avira PEC, 19 seconds
NO AV installed, 14 seconds