On my system and a couple of others, Avast has the most impact on system shutdown speed. It takes the longest for the PC to shutdown with Avast than any other AV products.
I have “Verbose or Highly Detailed Status Messages” enabled on Windows, which tries to shows what services are being shutdown during the shutdown process.
There are a couple of ways to enable it. You can try this:
“reg add “HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System” /v “VerboseStatus” /t REG_DWORD /d “1” /f”
For other AV products that I have tried, it doesn’t show any AV related services being shutting, but for Avast Free it shows two like the images below. Avast spends the most time on the second one, “aswbIDSAgent”.
If I remember correctly, a firewall related service is also shown if the Firewall is installed.
Avast should try to improve this.
Windows 11 Pro latest, Avast Free latest, No other security software is installed.
This won’t help, unfortunately. This is an internal Avast related thing that’s true for all system and pretty sure it’s already known to the Avast dev team. Though, I don’t know if they have enabled this verbose status logging to check if the services are being shown there. The devs can try to improve this and performance log from users like me won’t be necessary/won’t help, I think.
I know one thing for sure, if you aren’t prepared to help, how are they to get the information (relating to your system) that you think they must have.
The topic link given by Asyn, isn’t just enabling verbose mode logging (not a default option), but also you need to replicate the issue again and then send the information.
- download the configuration file from http://public.avast.com/~nix/users/wpr/avast-profile.wprp to some local folder (this step is not necessary on newest installation of Avast Antivirus)
- launch the elevated command line (cmd.exe as Administrator)
- go to the folder with downloaded file avast-profile.wprp
- start recording via command wpr.exe -start avast-profile.wprp (or with newest Avast Antivirus: wpr.exe -start "c:\ProgramData\Avast Software\Avast\profile.wprp")
reproduce the performance issue (e.g. if this is happening at the very same time, please “just” wait about a minute or two)
stop recording via command wpr -stop avast-log.etl
[b]- ZIP the log file avast-log.etl and share it via some cloud storage (google-drive, dropbox, one-drive) or avast FTP sever
provide a link to the zipped log file via avast forum[/b]
What I meant is, my system’s performance log should not be necessary because this slow shutdown issue is not exclusive to my system. It’s true for any system where Avast is installed. Enabling Verbose logging doesn’t add any delay. It’s meant to show what services are being shutting down during the shutdown process. Avast has always been slow at this, so I enabled verbose logging to check if it can detect anything related to Avast and turns out it can.
So yeah, Avast devs should try to speed up the process of shutting down Avast services to make system shutdown faster for everyone. And that’s what I asked. Things like this might not be a priority of the development team but I hope they do something about it.
Any dev working on things related to this would know what I’m talking about.
But anyway, this slowdown is related to system shutdown speed. So how am I gonna reproduce this and create a performance log? If I start performance recording and try to shutdown my system, the logging process would also be killed, I believe. So it doesn’t seem like there’s a way to record performance in this scenario.
Sounds like you’re not as willing to help as you’re willing to complain.
The type of system you have also has a bearing on how quickly your system starts and stops.
My old windows ten computer still struggles to start and takes a while to shut down. (I need patience)
The newer computers with more ram, faster processors and SSD drives don’t have that problem.
Check the last paragraph of my last reply. Looks like I can’t help even if I want to. The performance recording feature will be killed if I shutdown my system. If there’s any alternative method then tell me. If there’s isn’t any then forward this thread to the developers if possible.
I just tried it and like I said, it won’t work. After starting the logging process if I shutdown/restart the system, then “avast-log.etl” file is not created. It’s only created if I manually enter the stop code described in the link shared by Asyn. But since that’s not possible while the system is being shutdown, there’s no way to record a performance log.
So, only the developers can try to improve the stopping speed of Avast processes after system shutdown/restart is initiated. Currently, based on my own and some other people’s testing, with Avast it takes the longest time for the system to shutdown compared to other popular AV products. An improvement in this area would be appreciated.
It’s not that with other products it’s 5 seconds but with Avast it’s 30 seconds.
For comparison, with Microsoft Defender, my PC on average shutdown in 3 seconds. With a few other products like Norton or Kaspersky or ESET they add like 1 or 2 seconds more to that. So 5 seconds at max on my system on average but with Avast it often goes to 10 seconds. In some odd cases even more.
So not everyone will notice that. I think I saw you saying you have been using Avast for a long time, like more than 15 years. So you’re used to the time it takes for Avast, the same will be true for other long time Avast users. I as a user who has real world experience with multiple top AV products out there can notice these differences. I’m sure Avast devs are aware of it, but they can’t just fix it overnight, otherwise they would because Avast in general tries their best to fix issues quickly. My post was just a reminder that this issue exist, and hopefully they’ll be able to improve it.
If you are so disappointed with Avast, I have to ask why you are still using it.
I don’t suffer this, but then again:
I have a laptop and for the most part I don’t shut it down.
When I do shut it down, I don’t sit around timing it (it doesn’t appear really slow) I just shut it down.
But then again most of our systems, OSes, settings, Installed programs, windows settings, etc. etc. differ.
As I have said If that were the case (for everyone) then this forum would be on fire with it and I’m not seeing that.
I have already said what I wanted to say. This is not a thing about anyone’s personal opinion.
Avast slows down system shutdown which is a fact. This is not a groundbreaking issue but improvements on this will be appreciated. Unless an Avast employee have anything to ask me, there is nothing more to add from my side. Thanks.