Memory leak in Web Shield?

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

System: Vista Home Premium 32-bit SP2. 4 GB RAM. AMD Athlon X2 4850e. avast! 4.8 Home, with Standard Shield, Web Shield

Freshly booted, my system consumes ~980 MB. After about 4-5 hours of web surfing, it consumes 50% of my 4 GB. Task Manager and Resource Monitor both show the process taking up all that memory is ashWebSrv.exe. Is there a memory leak in the Web Shield?

2

Unlikely.
What if you close all your browser windows - does the memory usage drop?

3

hello tais

on my system (Vista Business, 4GB ram, Intel Core 2 Duo 2 x 2.8GHz that file uses 324KB with zero % consumption. I’ve only got the Web and the Network Shields running; I don’t keep the Standard Shield running though. Could it be the Standard Shield that is causing your large memory leak? Just a thought,

Marcus

4

ashWebSv.exe is currently taking up 85084 KB (85.08 MB) here. Not as large as the original poster’s but still unreasonably large. I was not using my browser when I got the memory consumption info from task manager.

Details:
avast 4.8.1335
Internet Mail, Network, Standard and Web Shields are currently running
Windows XP w/ SP3
1256 MB RAM

Edit: Added additional details and made post clearer

5

No, closing all browser windows doesn’t drop ashWebSv.exe’s memory consumption. Forgot to mention I’m running IE8.

6

What exactly does Task Manager show for ashWebSv.exe?

7

I uninstalled Web Shield as a test, and the same activity results in memory consumption growth from ~980 MB (around 32%) to 1.2 GB (around 40%), which is much more reasonable. Standard Shield and Network Shield are running.

8

In my opinion, the numbers you quote (“total memory consumption”) have a rather quesionable connection to reality (in Windows generally, nothing avast! specific).
However, if ashWebSv.exe uses hundreds of megabytes of memory (VM Size column in Task Manager) while no browser processes are running, it might be interesting to check the dump - if you’d be able and willing to create one and upload it to our FTP.

The description on how to create a dump of this process is e.g. here.
Note that you have to disable avast! self-defense first (avast! Settings / Troubleshooting page), otherwise it won’t be possible to dump the process.

9

Re-installed Web Shield, and it seems now to behave properly.

10

Glad you get everything working. Feel free to come back any time you need help.