slow newsgroup downloading

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

Since a few days, downloading binary newsgroups in GrabIt has changed behaviour

Purple download bars are no longer progressive
ashMaiSv.exe is taking a lot of CPU (~30-50%)

Seems like suddenly, downloading goes through avast mail/news resident scanner when it didn’t before…

I tried disabling “scan inbound news” in the avast NNTP settings & stop/restart service, but it doesn’t change a thing !

Thanks for your help and your wonderful antivirus

2

hmm after further testing…
when disabling both inbound & outbound news scanning in NNTP settings
newsgroup downloading get back to normal behaviour

strange this has changed since a few days…
(i don’t think i did change those settings in the past few days)

3

NNTP scanning is on by default when you have the Internet mail provider enabled, so you may not have changed anything.

There have been some problems with other news grabbers so I don’t know if this issue that effected News Leacher. I don’t know if your Grablt has a similar function.

The News Leacher supersearch uses a protocol other than NNTP on port 119 and that is a problem for the mail scanner. The workaround is the option “Use alt. supersearch port” in NewsLeecher options or to put the address 70.86.176.98 to the Internet Mail’s ignored addresses.

4

To know more, maybe you can add the following line to the [MailScanner] section of \data\avast4.ini:

Log=20

Then generate some traffic (download newsgroups in GrabIt ), simulate the problem (i.e. force the avast mail scanner to time out by sending an email with attachment) and then post here the contents of the file \data\log\aswMaiSv.log

Details: http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=12234.msg103474#msg103474

5

Well, i’m not sure I get your point DavidR & Tech

In fact, now that I turned off both inbound & outbound NNTP scanner, I have no problem. (I guess the real-time scanner will catch eventual viruses when I open downloaded files anyway)

My problem was not related to (timeout during) mail sending or to a supersearch mode on port 119 (GrabIt doesn’t have such a feature)

The things that could still be considered as “problem” (when NNTP scanner is turned on) are :

  • The fact that AshMaiSv.exe takes a lot of CPU when analyzing NNTP download of binary messages that are 15 MB big (but download goes ok, just the machine is significantly slowed down… when I stop downloading, CPU gets back to normal)
  • The fact that news grabbers don’t see the progression of download anymore, until the current part of the message is fully downloaded (but I guess you can’t change that because the NNTP scanner fully download the part and scans it before giving it to the news grabber)

So if you still think a log file is interesting, I can post a log

6

Yes, it will.

Are you using the last avast version? Which firewall do you have?