multiple (50) instances of ashWebSv.exe

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

I’m running Vista Home Premium and today I noticed I have 50 instances of ashWebSv.exe running in the processes list in the taskmanager.
They stay open whether the browser is open or not.

Anyone?

2

I have seen one other post (with an image) of this issue, though not 50 instances of ashWebSv.exe multiple instances. I don’t know if that one was also Vista OS, but my XP task manager only reports 1 instance.

I don’t know if this would be different if I or you used IE and had multiple windows open ?
I use firefox so only see one window with multiple tabs.

I would normally suggest that you do a clean reinstall, but I don’t use Vista nor IE7 so I can’t test to see if there would be multiple occurrences of ashwebsv.exe. It certainly wouldn’t hurt to try it.

Download the latest version of avast http://www.avast.com/eng/download-avast-home.html and save it to your HDD, somewhere you can find it again. Use that when you reinstall.

Download the avast! Uninstall Utility, find it here and save it to your HDD.

Now uninstall (using add remove programs), reboot, run the avast! Uninstall Utility, reboot, install the latest version, reboot.

3

Where? Into TCPView? Into your firewall activity log? Or into Windows task manager?

4

He says the task manager in the text you quoted.

I have also see an image of the same thing (in task manager) today in another topic, I couldn’t find it though.

5

I suggest an installation from the scratch:

  1. Uninstall avast from Control Panel first.
  2. Boot.
  3. Download the latest version of Avast Uninstall and use it for complete uninstallation.
  4. Boot.
  5. Install again the latest avast! version.
  6. Boot.
  7. Check and post the results.
6

I suspect this is the post David is referring to:

http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=36114.msg303892#msg303892

7

But we do not find an answer and don’t know how to troubleshoot it…

8

Yes Alan that is the one.
Since your involved in that topic you might suggest to skyguy a clean reinstall and see if it resolves the problem.

9

lister, indeed an interesting problem.

Could you please open the Task Manager again, go to the Processes page, menu View → Select columns and check the box next to “Threads”.
What is the Threads value for each of the ashWebSv.exe processes?

Thanks
Vlk

10

After a reboot, the problem has gone away. I’ll certainly post back if it happens again.

Though i’ll soon be formatting and installing XP on the laptop, so it may not happen again.

11

Good-day. I searched and found this topic the other day because I also had 50 of them. I followed the advice and re-booted and they went away.

I’ve noticed for some time that I’ve been having a ‘chattering’ problem, freezing for a split second etc. (Can’t remember when it started.)

Today I noticed that my hard drive was chattering a bit again and so looked at the task manager: my normal 50 processes had once again jumped to 100. But this time I had the following:

scvhost.exe = 9 of them (6 to 32 threads)
winRAR.exe = 41 of them (1 to 3 threads)

Note that it adds up to 50 once again. This may help someone somewhere to get a handle on what’s going on.

Thank you.

I suppose it would help if I told you it was Vista Basic on an Acer.

12

Hi folks. I was wondering if there has been any update to this problem. I have completed an uninstall and reinstall as suggested by Tech & DavidR. Still have the problem. It’s really dragging the performance of the computer down. The problem always occurs on start-up and persists for as long as 45 minutes. After start-up, all instances but one will close and things seem to run pretty smoothly after that.

TIA

Jim

13

Please read VKL post

14

Shows a thread value of 18 at the moment. I have no idea what that means. Also, at the moment, I only have one instance of the .exe running.

Jim

15

I believe that is normal as I only have one occurrence of ashwebsv.exe and it has 21 threads, that I guess is related to what it has scanned, the number of windows/tabs open, etc. (I really don’t know for sure). I have firefox with 11 open tabs.

16

Was this anomaly ever figured out? I’ve been recommending Avast! product for awhile now, and everything was perfect. One or two versions back, people begin experience MAJOR slowdowns with Avast! installed. In these people’s Task Managers I’d see three or more instances of ashWebSv.exe. The only way to bring back the performance is to disable Avast! Web Shield permanently and re-boot. Uninstalling Avast! and even running the Avast! Cleanup utility and re-booting and re-installing Avast! freshly doesn’t resolve this anomaly.

So far I’ve only seen XP users experience this anomaly, … I’m in hopes the problem would be quickly resolved, but after having read over different topics regarding this anomaly, it doesn’t seem even the developers have any clues to why this is occurring.

Regards,
Phant0m``

17

While this particular anomaly doesn’t exists on a particular type of computer system, one of the commonly affected computer systems that I have observed this anomaly on is with the Intel Celerons. Celerons are very slow to begin with, and with Avast! installed make booting up that much more slower, but with this Web Shield anomaly it brings these Celeron systems to a crawl for the entire Windows session.

The only logical step is to stop recommending Avast! until the Avast! development teams takes this anomaly seriously and addresses it finally.

18

@Phant0m``

Typically if the user chooses a Celeron based system then it will have a small amount of RAM and that is the major cause of slow systems so adding RAM is the best solution and to not recommend avast! is not.

RAM is the best and cheapest investment to improve system performance.

19

Has nothing to-do with not having enough RAM in these computers, these computers are fairly new and have 1 through to 2GBs of RAM. Also this isn’t specific to Celerons, I have reported a similar if not identical problem happening on Pentium 4 system back in Dec 2008.

And I don’t remember seeing several ashWebSv.exe instances running in people’s Windows Task Manager up until mid to late 2008.

What are the conditions for two or more instances of ashWebSv.exe to be loaded? Does it have something to-do with simultaneous connections?

I would really like to have this problem investigated, I’ll do the WebShield log activation and e-mail it.

20

No, it shouldn’t. Normal installations have a lot of connections without multiply WebShield instances.