Hi !
I have avast 5 and there is a very large usntr.log file in the folder
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Alwil Software\Avast5\log
It’s larger than 250 mb :o and my defragmentation tool says that this file has 20482 fragments on drive C: :o :o
Is it safe to delete usntr.log or does avast need it ? Not useful for me because i can’t read it, the notepad crashes with such huge files…
Thanks a lot !
it’s the persistence cache log; yeah you can delete it, it’s just a log …deactivate the self-defense module first, and if that’s not enough stop avast services, then delete it.
The other thing is that the devs might want to see it if it’s that big (you said 250MB). Just back it up in case it’s needed here for troubleshooting. If you’re asked to, you could always upload it to avast ftp. Don’t do it yet 
…wait for someone from Avast to comment here first…
Upload that ? :o
with my bad internet connection this would take many days ;D
why a large log file is so particular ? does that mean i have a problem with my computer config ?
I don’t know what you have on your system ?
Must be a huge amount of program executables which are included in the persistent cache, mine is the grand total of 2MB, see image.
no no you don’t have to upload it, that was just in case a dev would be interested. And if you got a bad connection, just forget it
yeah like David says, that log never goes beyond a few megs, so your 250 MB are a bit weird…
I had an idea
i tried to split the log file with a file splitter into 1mb files. Then i can read them.
I discovered this (this is the first lines of the log) :
2 0 / 0 1 / 2 0 1 0 1 4 : 2 9 : 1 5 P r o c e s s i n g f i l e C : \ W I N D O W S \ s y s t e m 3 2 \ M s i m t f . d l l . . . 2 0 / 0 1 / 2 0 1 0 1 4 : 2 9 : 1 6 - - > F i n i s h e d [ 0 ] [ p r o c e s s i n g t o o k 1 1 8 7 m s ] . 2 0 / 0 1 / 2 0 1 0 1 4 : 2 9 : 1 6 P r o c e s s i n g f i l e C : \ W I N D O W S \ s y s t e m 3 2 \ b r o w s e l c . d l l . . . 2 0 / 0 1 / 2 0 1 0 1 4 : 2 9 : 1 6 - - > F i n i s h e d [ 0 ] [ p r o c e s s i n g t o o k 9 4 m s ] .
When i compare to the other logs, it should looks like this (I removed spaces) :
20/01/2010 14:29:15 Processing file C:\WINDOWS\system32\Msimtf.dll…
20/01/2010 14:29:16 -->Finished[0][processingtook1187ms].
20/01/2010 14:29:16 Processing file C:\WINDOWS\system32\browselc.dll…
20/01/2010 14:29:16 -->Finished[0][processingtook94ms].
So it appears my 250mb log has many spaces between each character that has been logged on an endless line. I think it’s why the file is so huge…
Well I don’t know about that Mine is small enough to open in Notepad and the layout isn’t on a single line, but ordered as your second example, see image.
So I don’t know in using the splitter program it is somehow losing the formatting that would be in the text based log file.
For what it’s worth, mine’s about 5 megs.
Slightly off-topic, and more from curiosity than anything else … anyone know if that log is set up to self-clean when you do a scan and one or more apps have been uninstalled since the previous scan? Obviously you have the option of deleting the file and putting up with a much slower scan time the next time around, since it’ll have to be re-populated from scratch, and in the case of that 250 meg one the OP mentioned, I’d be curious to see if trying that resulted in any significant reduction in size (after the re-population, that is).
I don’t believe it has an self cleaning/paring as it certainly doesn’t comply with the restricted size I have set for logs in the avast Settings, Maintenance, Logs section of 128KB.
This is the same for other logs that are used by avast (setup.log, etc.), rather than user logs for the various resident shield logs.
Greetings to all,
While I looked in C:\Documents and Settings\All users\Application Data\Alwil Software\Avast5\log, I found out that my usntr.log and setup.log files are quite big : usntr.log = 56.9MB and setup.log = 20.9MB.
This is strange since the Maintenance default maximum log file is set to 4096KB.
What is going on here ?
After some research, I ended up here.
Following what was suggested earlier, I then decided to remove my usntr.log file.
I then restarted my laptop and went back to the log folder.
Avast! had not created a new usntr.log file !?
Now I know this topic is a few weeks old, but if someone can see any wisdom in these two weird occurrences, I would gladly appreciate it !
Thanks.
tor, check your scanner settings … in particular, do you have both the transient and persistent cache things ticked as active? If not, no new cache will be created to replace the one you deleted. Plus you’ll lose the benefit of caching, which makes quite a diff in my case (full scan in ver 5, including default archive types, is about twice as fast as a similar scan (without archives) was in 4.8, once the cache has been populated.
(Edit, as an afterthought) If by any chance you’ve uninstalled a lot of major stuff recently (and it turns out you did disable the caching, as I suspect), try re-enabling caching and see if the resulting cache file is significantly smaller (first scan will take much longer since the cache has to be re-populated from scratch). In another thread a while back I’d asked whether the caching setup self-cleaned data relating to uninstalled things, and while no one from Avast/Alwil ever commented on this, the other members here generally agreed that it didn’t seem to do this.
As for the setup log, you can use Notepad and trim that down to just the last week or two, anything older probably won’t be much if any use if you run into problems needing debugging.
Thank you for replying MikeBCda.
Under my " File System Shield Settings ", both « Use transcient caching » and « Use persistent caching » were ticked as active.
They still are…
In my Scan Settings (performance) " Store data about scanned files in the persistent cache " was (and still is) ticked as active.
I never changed any of these settings or made any modifications of that sort.
I did delete the usntr.log but not the setup.log or uninstalled anything else.
The problem is somewhere else I beleive…