Crazy amounts of "Data Sent" in activity monitor but no app seems to be sending out that much data

[iBug2]

I checked the network panel on my activity monitor today. There's a huge data sent total sum down below, but when I go app by app, all apps seem normal. And their sum totally does not make up that much. The total is about 145 GB since last boot, which was quite recent and I didn't upload anything that large myself anyway.

When I go app by app the highest number is on my VPN app, with 1.5 GB, which is normal.

The only other explanation I can think of is that I streamed several movies to my Apple TV from my Mac and those would count as Data Sent since they are using the network interface. But then again, why are those not counted in any of the apps above?

 

[Brian33]

There are probably a number of things that might contribute to what you're seeing. One I can think of is that the list of processes is a snapshot of the processes that exist at that specific moment, while the Data Sent at the bottom is (I believe) a total since the last boot.

Activity Monitor only shows processes that currently exist, as evidenced by the PID (process ID) column. A process that started, sent a lot of data, and then terminated won't be shown at all. This probably applies to "worker" processes that might be spawned by a parent process and that terminate when they are done with their task. I doubt that their "data sent" is included in the figure shown for the parent process.