Tracing Abnormal Volumes of Internet Traffic

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alasta

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#94811 19-Dec-2011 14:44

I'm just wondering if anyone can recommend any applications or techniques that I could use to determine which specific processes or applications are consuming Internet traffic on my MacBook Pro running OS X Lion. I have a drain of about 5mb per minute while my machine is sitting idle which is a huge problem for me while I am incurring out-of-canopy charges on 2degrees, so I really need to diagnose what's going on and find a solution.

Thanks.

MikeB4

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#559641 19-Dec-2011 15:26

Do you have Photo Stream activated or iCloud? these can cause data movement in the background

Here is a crazy notion, lets give peace a chance.

geocom

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#559654 19-Dec-2011 15:48

There is one that i know of called Rubbernet which i just got as part of a bundle. Really nice gui tells you what app is using the internet right now and how much it is using and when it was last active on the network.

Another one would be wireshark however it is really convoluted and can be really confessing however it will tell you what is being sent within the session however you will need x11 installed(Should be on the mac already). Warning i believe this would be illegal on public networks or without permission from every user as the details you can see is everything happening on the network unless encrypted

Geoff E

johnr

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#559662 19-Dec-2011 16:02

Wireshark

wellygary

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#559663 19-Dec-2011 16:02

I am told that little snitch works well

http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html

alasta

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#559686 19-Dec-2011 17:02

KiwiNZ: Do you have Photo Stream activated or iCloud? these can cause data movement in the background

That was my first suspicion but I've tried turning off Photostream and the problem still persisted. Admittedly I haven't tried turning off iCloud altogether so I probably should give that a try.

Thanks for all the other app suggestions.

alasta

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#559954 20-Dec-2011 14:15

Just as an update to this, I think I have isolated the problem to Photostream. As mentioned above I previously switched off Photostream and was under the impression that doing so had not resolved the problem, however it seems that I was mistaken either because it didn't disable properly or because I was reading off my telco's usage meter which may be subject to some lag.

So, I am fast coming to the conclusion that there is a serious deficiency with Photostream on the basis that:
- Since my Photostream was last brought fully up to date I have only shot an absolute maximum of 200mb of photos yet I have at least 500mb of unexplained internet traffic that has bled away.
- If I look at my Photostream on my iPhone I can see all photos are up to date, hence there should be no further data needing to be transmitted to Photostream by my Mac. Despite this it continues to rapidly push huge amounts of data to the Photostream server.

I am going to try resetting my Photostream and re-enabling it to see what happens. In the meantime I recommend that anyone using Photostream should closely monitor their Internet usage to ensure that this feature isn't needlessly sucking up massive amounts of Internet traffic.

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zebedee99

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#566470 9-Jan-2012 12:46

we had a huge unexplained bandwidth drain, turned out to be MAIL continually syncing with google mail app - now we just use the gmail web interface instead of a mail client. rubbernet helped us track down the culprit during the free trial period offered although be wary of traffic that was just the imac backing up to time capsule wirelessly. ggod luck