Hello,
I’m a huge fan of Avast
However, Windows reports that Avast free takes 918Mb after the installation. I only installed the first 2 modules (File and behavioral shields)
I think 918Mb is way too much. Please have a look at the attachment
Please reduce the disk consumption in the future version
Thank you so much
Regards,
Rain
On a 500GB HDD which seems to be a standard in all low end laptops, that’s a 1/500th of entire space. Is it REALLY a problem? I also have avast! on laptop with 128GB SSD and hybrid netbook with 64GB integrated SSD. No capacity problems. While they could probably trim it down, it’s really insignificant these days. Back in the day when I had 4GB HDD (yeah, hello year 2000-ish) this would be a problem. And we still used Norton which was like 500MB anyway lol…
If you want more space…
I still have a 10 Mb hard-drive laying around here somewhere. ;D
If you look at where all that space is being primarily used it is the definitions folder, over 600MB. The second biggest folder is the Setup one at about 370MB.
I don’t know how you’d reduce the size of the definitions folder, in fact you’d expect that to keep on continuously increasing size. But I checked my old 40GB HDD laptop which I was using until it died about 15 months ago and the up to date AVAST definitions folder from that in March 2016 was only 183MB and the Setup folder 250+MB. The total size of the AVAST installation footprint has doubled in that time. The definitions folder is the culprit vastly increasing in size over three times.
I’d be interested to know why.
A program just under 1GB can be accommodated on most modern devices but and when you’re using a 120GB SSD as your primary drive, common in mid-priced desktops, then it is still a significant amount of space.
A very, very long time ago virus definitions were compressed, whilst this reduced disk space required, but there was a penalty, I believe scanning speed was impacted.
Well, I’d blame the malware writers for the increase in definition folder size. Avast version 5, as I remember, covered around 3,000,000 + definitions and that was more than a few years ago. Current version, 17.4, has almost 6.5 million definitions, and a feature of the definitions table is that every known definition will cover related definitions (up to 100 or so) but are not hard-coded in the database. The tasks and areas to cover have also grown over time. For example, version 5 introduced streaming updates but did not cover ransomware and so on.
There also was an effort to reduce the number of covered definitions by avast shortly after version 5 was brought out.
Increase in size is due to Avast doing it’s job. Lucky for us, drive capacity has kept pace. 
Consider that people who make images of their system regularly for backup purposes, and keep multiple copies going back months, would probably prefer cutting bloat where reasonably possible. Having an extra gigabyte of data times 10 or 20 adds up. Especially since Avast is just one of many programs that has grown fast and furious these last years. Personally I just accept that I have to reserve the extra backup space, and compress the images.
Maybe give the option to use compressed definitions. Modern multicore machines with plenty of fast ram can decompress on the fly no problem.
On my machine the setup-folder is a lot bigger than the definitions. 431 MB for the setup-folder vs 266 MB for the defs. So if you would want to trim the fat, maybe just keep an installer stub and download components as needed.
I do weekly full drive image backups, keeping the last six full backups.
Most image backup programs compress the image backup file, for me that is an essential backup & recovery strategy so I don’t really care about program installed sizes. This is mainly because I keep my system relatively cr4p free, no clutter, programs that don’t get used on a regular basis are very likely to get uninstalled.
IMO, avast could have done better to reduce the size of the program. Of course, it’s not a huge problem for us but less space used should be better
for some reasons, avast increases the boot time to a significantly, more than some of the competitors. Not sure if that’s related to the large size of avast
It has nothing to do with the disc space needed by the program.