Avira Changing Update Method

Due to the fact that updates are becoming a problem for many users, the folks at Avira Antivirus are changing the method and size of the updates, so as to make the system more reliable.

I have noticed the problem with my systems that run Avira in the last couple of weeks, but according to an article on gHacks, the problem has been around longer than that.

We ran a post in the beginning of this month (read: Avira Antivir Update Hangs)that mentioned a growing problem that users of Avira Antivir were experiencing. The problem these users were experiencing was a permanent update failure during the virus definition update of the antivirus software. Some users were able to fix these difficulties by manually updating their Antivir installation, others were not able to solve the problem and decided to switch to other security software programs instead.

Avira made an announcement a few days ago where they addressed that problem somewhat. They mention that they have realized that “users of the free Avira AntiVir Personal had issues fetching the Updates in time recently”. This is not exactly the same issue but it could very well be related.

The problem that I noticed was not only that the auto-update was not working, a forced manual update would not work either. It was to the point where trying to force a manual update was getting nowhere  after about 20 minutes, so I would close the updater down, and then open Opera to go get the virus signature file. Apparently I was not the only one doing this.

The Avira tech blog has this to say about the trouble -

Due to the fast growing amount of malware out there in the wild our virus definition files grow fast as well. We monitored the situation with our Updates very closely. We realise that users of the free Avira AntiVir Personal had issues fetching the Updates in time recently and did come up with a few ideas how we could solve the problem and to better satisfy the needs of our users.

Two of the results are getting realized today: First, we switch from our current virus definition files (called iVDF) to a new format called nVDF. iVDF consists of 4 VDF files, while nVDF uses at least 32 files – we need to transfer less data for updating our virus definitions effectively in the future.

This means that we need to deliver about 25 MByte to every Avira installation starting today for switching to the new update system. This might lead to some delays for some users, especially for the users of our free version Avira AntiVir Personal. Just to get an idea about what we’re talking here: More than 100.000.000 Users are trying to get the update more or less on the same day. That is more than 2.5 Petabytes (or 2,500 Terabytes) of traffic.

To ease the bandwidth bottleneck, we decided to additionally use a Content Delivery Network (CDN). We were first testing a CDN built up by our current Internet service provider. Shortly after activating the CDN, the redirectors – which redirect the update requests to servers close to the users location – were overloaded and couldn’t answer the requests anymore. The situation was solved a little later on, but the CDN isn’t big enough yet to spread this huge update in time. So we decided to switch to a global player in the CDN market to deliver the update.

We hope that the data is transferred much faster this way so also the users of free Avira AntiVir Personal can enjoy their security solution without any problems: After this Update the situation will get much better for the users of Avira AntiVir Personal.

N.B.: Users of commercial Avira products like Avira AntiVir Premium, Avira Premium Security Suite or Avira AntiVir Professional don’t face any of these problems as they access our servers with reserved bandwidth.

Dirk Knop

Technical Editor

So the free users are the only ones affected. We may see some other changes coming, but I really doubt that the free version will go away. It would admit to being defeated by the likes of Microsoft, and I don’t see any of the utility manufacturers doing that anytime soon.

As of this morning, I have not seen the update, but I also have not missed one of the older IVF updates either. Possibly this will happen at the first of the week for me. I am not sure why, but I seem to be the last to get updates – the Microsoft yellow shield indicating patch Tuesday updates usually only hits my machines early Wednesday morning.

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