"Macavasthelper" using tons of virtual memory?

Avast Mac Security
1

My apologies in advance for not being as tech-savvy as most of the folks around here seem to be!

I was clicking random buttons last night while waiting for an internet connection issue to be resolved, and stumbled upon the activity monitor. I spent a couple minutes trying to wrap my head around what these columns were telling me, and finally settled on being distressed that “Macavasthelper” is apparently using 30+G of virtual memory (and 7Mb of real memory). Avast! itself also appears to have 35+G in this VSize column.

Is this something I should be concerned with?

EDIT: I’m using a 2-year-old SSD that I generally only have 8-10G of free space on, is why I was worried.
EDITx2: Listing another column in the activity monitor dropped Vsize numbers across the board, macavasthelper’s to 8G and change. Read that this would happen in a number of other forums/threads, but still not sure what it means. ???

2

The huge number is caused by the garbage collector of cocoa and is nearly meaningless as it is unallocated memory. To be sure, you can run vmmap on the suspicious process - you should see the GBs of virtual memory as unallocated there.

3

Thank ya muchly. Good to know it isn’t constantly using up all that space it is claiming to need. Will search out this “vmmap” to further comfort myself.