How is AVG AS taming mem usage?

My normal process memory usage is around + or - 50% of 1G of RAM. After a complete scan, usage is reduced to almost 30%. I've checked several times now and it stays nice and low until a reboot! A good thing but what the heck, how can this be happening?

 

This queery is appearing in other forums as well
Some feed back from the Ewidow Team would be helpful and of interest

 

This has been discussed on the forum before (though I can't find the thread now!).

It is a feature of ewido/AVG-AS that doing a memory scan will cause memory usage to drop because it clears out unnecessary usage by other apps.

Apps are sometimes reluctant to relinquish memory they have taken, even though they no longer require it. Thus an AVG-AS memory scan will free-up this spare memory.

 

You are so correct! I'd narrowed it down to memory scanning (only one minute and 43 seconds with AVG A-S), so I did a memory only scan with Spy Sweeper and indeed, it had the opposite effect, increasing memory usage about 18%. This is a great feature AVG A-S has going for it!