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Mysterious Bandwidth Use

K

kuwisdelu

macrumors 65816
Original poster
The past couple days I've noticed something weird going on with my network connection. When I'm not even using the internet, sometimes I'll see large uploads and downloads in Activity Monitor, up to 1-2 MB/s, which is a lot for my internet connection. This will happen when I'm not loading any webpages or downloading or uploading anything that I know of. I had a P2P filesharing program recently, but I've since deleted it, and the mysterious bandwidth use persists. I also have Transmission, but it's never open when this happens.

I'm using a wireless connection to a Time Capsule. I have Time Machine pointed at its disk, which has been acting up a little lately. The only other thing I can think of is that perhaps this has something to do with Time Machine doing something without telling me. I'm at a loss to explain it. I'm on a secure WPA-protected network. I've seen someone else's iTunes shared library on my protected network before, but considered it a glitch, until I got paranoid and changed the password, which solved that problem. I don't have any other ideas now.

So, any ideas out there? Thanks!
 
kuwisdelu said:
I've seen someone else's iTunes shared library on my protected network before, but considered it a glitch, until I got paranoid and changed the password, which solved that problem. I don't have any other ideas now.

So, any ideas out there? Thanks!
Click to expand...

you saw someone else's itunes library on your network? was this someone else in your house, or just some random library?

If your running a WPA encrypted network.. i wouldn't expect to see anything unexpected on your network like that.
 
time machine

Without knowing anything else, I'd say it's Time Machine doing it's hourly backup. Check Time Machine, see when the most recent back up was. Does that coincide with when you had a network activity spike? That's my guess.
 
Fuzzbear said:
you saw someone else's itunes library on your network? was this someone else in your house, or just some random library?

If your running a WPA encrypted network.. i wouldn't expect to see anything unexpected on your network like that.
Click to expand...

Neither would I. I haven't seen it since I changed the password, which is suspicious to me. I live in an apartment building with lots of wireless networks, and some of them are unprotected (which I would never be stupid enough to do). However, once in a while, when waking from sleep, my Airport will connect to one of the unprotected networks if it sees it before seeing my own network. Sometimes when I saw the other iTunes library, I found I was actually on a different network--but not always. My theory--assuming no one has hacked my WPA network--is that after changing from the unprotected neighboring network to my own, iTunes didn't necessarily update, and left the library there. But I have no way of knowing this for sure.

cawesjmu said:
Without knowing anything else, I'd say it's Time Machine doing it's hourly backup. Check Time Machine, see when the most recent back up was. Does that coincide with when you had a network activity spike? That's my guess.
Click to expand...

That's what I would have guessed, except that I have Time Machine in my menu bar, and it's not always doing a backup when I see strange network bandwidth use.
 
kuwisdelu said:
Neither would I. I haven't seen it since I changed the password, which is suspicious to me. I live in an apartment building with lots of wireless networks, and some of them are unprotected (which I would never be stupid enough to do). However, once in a while, when waking from sleep, my Airport will connect to one of the unprotected networks if it sees it before seeing my own network. Sometimes when I saw the other iTunes library, I found I was actually on a different network--but not always. My theory--assuming no one has hacked my WPA network--is that after changing from the unprotected neighboring network to my own, iTunes didn't necessarily update, and left the library there. But I have no way of knowing this for sure.
Click to expand...

Yes, iTunes will keep shared libraries it finds there for a short time after you switch networks sometimes, so that might be all it was. I've seen it keep them there even after waking from sleep from being somewhere else for a couple minutes at least. Depends on how long before you try to access an internet based feature in iTunes.

jW
 
Mal said:
Yes, iTunes will keep shared libraries it finds there for a short time after you switch networks sometimes, so that might be all it was. I've seen it keep them there even after waking from sleep from being somewhere else for a couple minutes at least. Depends on how long before you try to access an internet based feature in iTunes.

jW
Click to expand...

I hardly ever use internet-based iTunes features, so that explains that, at least. Puts my mind to rest as far as hacks go. Now I just need to figure out where this strange bandwidth use is coming from...
 
In a similar vein, anyone know why kernel_task would mysteriously jump to 30% CPU when doing nothing but listening to iTunes and editing text in Terminal?
 
I think I found the culprit. I just checked Spotlight and it says "Indexing Backup of [my name]'s Computer - About 89 Hours Remaining."
 
kuwisdelu said:
I think I found the culprit. I just checked Spotlight and it says "Indexing Backup of [my name]'s Computer - About 89 Hours Remaining."
Click to expand...

Spotlight doesn't access the internet at all, as far as I know. The bandwidth is more likely to come from applications checking for updates or something like that. Of course, it does explain the kernel_task surge, possibly. That's not unusual, though, so probably nothing to worry about.

jW
 
Mal said:
Spotlight doesn't access the internet at all, as far as I know. The bandwidth is more likely to come from applications checking for updates or something like that. Of course, it does explain the kernel_task surge, possibly. That's not unusual, though, so probably nothing to worry about.

jW
Click to expand...

But if it's indexing the Time Machine backup, wouldn't that account for the network bandwidth being used, from accessing information stored on my Time Capsule?
 
kuwisdelu said:
But if it's indexing the Time Machine backup, wouldn't that account for the network bandwidth being used, from accessing information stored on my Time Capsule?
Click to expand...

Heh, missed that you were using a Time Capsule. In that case, dead right.

jW
 
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