I see this subject has been addressed somewhat here but I just wanted to share my experience. I noticed my disk writes were increasing at a huge rate and found the culprit to be Glasswire. The attached image is about 5 hours of computer use and Glasswire has written 6GB of writes to my drive (an SSD). I’m seeing 20GB+ per day of writes.
I don’t torrent or do anything unusual. Most of my usage is 10-15 Chrome tabs, Thunderbird, and Spotify. I also play Hearthstone for about 30 minutes every other day or so. Beyond watching occasional Youtube videos or downloading a driver or something there’s not much more there.
I’m probably going to uninstall Glasswire for now. These writes are just too much even on a physical drive for what I’m using it for. I understand logging is going to require a large volume of writes but I actually primarily use Glasswire to monitor my bandwidth because my connection has a cap on it, for me the firewall features are almost secondary although nice.
Hopefully there can be a less verbose option in the future that minimizes this disk activity.
GlassWire stores host information (when not it incognito mode), so it will write to your hard drive to store that information.
Writing and reading operations are called Input\Output (IO) operations. So ProcessExplorer’s “IO read bytes” or “IO write bytes” stats are about the total amount of bytes transmitted as IO operations. In other words 8GB of “IO write bytes” means that the total amount of bytes written by GlassWire to a network connection or to disk or to a device driver is 8GB, but it does not mean that GlassWire has written 8GB to disk.
We tested this ourselves with ProcessExplorer and we estimated with heavy network usage GlassWire might write about 200MB to disk over a 7 day period while GlassWire is sending around 7.8GB of data from its user interface to its driver (not writing to the SSD).
We are working on an update that does not log hosts or traffic types as an option for people like yourself who feel nervous about using their drives. For example our Android app does not log host or traffic type info so it does not write much.
Thanks for your response. If you note in my image the I/O Write bytes is 6.47GB but the disk write bytes are 6.02GB. I’m also seeing these disk writes on the SSD reporting so these do appear to be actual writes. I’m not sure how you’re seeing 200MB over a week with heavy usage. I checked in Process Explorer and the above image is from Process Hacker 2 running in admin mode, these do appear to be actual disk writes and not just I/O throughput.
I’ve attached the below pic of my task manager, Glasswire spikes disk writes like this often and often higher so it appears to be real writes:
Thanks. GlassWire logs network activity so it will always have to write data.
We are working on an update that will not write host/traffic type info as an option so people like yourself won’t have to use your hard drive. Without logging hosts and traffic types GlassWire won’t have to write much.
Meanwhile you can also switch to “Incognito” mode and just use GlassWire as a firewall if you don’t want to log anything, or you can move your database to another HD.
Open the C:\ProgramData\glasswire\service\ folder;
Create the file glasswire.conf
Add this string to the glasswire.conf:db_file_path=d:\glasswire.db
Instead of the “D:\glasswire.db” you can set any other path, which is preferable for you. Now if you restart the service, the new database will be created at d:\glasswire.db.
The previous database will be kept at the C:\ProgramData\glasswire\service\glasswire.db. Also you may stop the service, move the C:\ProgramData\glasswire\service\glasswire.db to D:\glasswire.db, and start the service.
In that case Glasswire will continue to work with the previous database.
The service may be stopped and started at the task manager’s “Services” tab or at the Windows Service manager.
