Cornell Finch

AVG Antivirus – The Web Bandwidth Killer

Whilst at my Dad’s new PC the other night, admiring the speed and the twinkling lights on the front of the spanky box, I pulled up Google and searched for something or other, I remember not what.

Looking at the results there seemed to be these little ticks in green boxes next to each search result that the search engine had produced. Hovering over the link told me that the link had been scanned by AVG anti-virus and it was safe to visit. How cool was that!

Skip forward to a few minutes ago and I’m doing my daily skip read/scan of The Register – a primarily techie and IT news site [1. and also the home of Bastard Operator From Hell - a must reader for any tech admin!] and AVG Antivirus is right there on the front page. Ooh, let’s have a read says I. So I did.

It would seem that the new scanner introduced by AVG goes and scans each site for security and then returns the results to the user’s AVG install. Doing so uses bandwidth for the website and the end-user [2. and I would assume slows the search return time while it scans], which as everybody knows is at a premium. It’s not just limited to bandwidth though.

Whenever AVG scans a site it (the site) will record that hit in the web statistics. OSBlues recounts an interesting story about an investigation for one of his users where there was a spike in traffic. He put it down to the AVG scanner. In the comments for that article there’s information on how to disable the web-scanning on the user’s machine.

I fear though that many users will not care as they got AVG 8 for free and all the web content is free in their eyes too. That’s a different story entirely…

If you’re using AVG 8 then please consider the bandwidth of the little guy like me, help me save it and turn off this facility.