Why is it constantly downloading ???

[colour]

A few days ago my internet started to really really slow down, after I installed istat menu i realized that something is constantly downloading 24/7... this is random because on boot it starts to download at 50kb/s and there are no apps running ? (screenshot above)

This is really confusing me as I dont know what is going on, im starting to think i should re install OSX because my internet has slowed down dramatically ! NB: im using wifi and i have 2011 i7 macbook pro. (when I plug it in via ethernet it does the same thing)

does anyone have any idea of what it could be ?

 

[colour]

apparently my speeds are fine when downloading via torrents, but web browsing is very very slow.

 

[mulo]

did you check for updates?

 

[Hastings101]

If you're web browing and torrenting at the same time, that's why it will be slow. It sucks up a lot of bandwidth to download and upload torrents and can affect your browsing speed.

Also, maybe you've got some programs that use internet access constantly launching at startup and running in the background?

 

[plinden]

Open Terminal and type:

lsof -i | grep ESTABLISHED

This will tell you what processes have an established internet connection.

 

[kuwisdelu]

Software Update will download updates in the background. Check if there are updates available.

 

[Nermal]

Software Update will download updates in the background. Check if there are updates available.

Yep, by default it'll download in the background without asking or telling you. It's a very irresponsible default but thankfully you can turn it off under Sys Prefs > Software Update > Download updates automatically.

 

[colour]

Yep, by default it'll download in the background without asking or telling you. It's a very irresponsible default but thankfully you can turn it off under Sys Prefs > Software Update > Download updates automatically.

I have turned that off now and i dont think that was it.

im not running any applications ie torrents or downloading anything at all. its just constantly pushing 50-60 kb/s no idea where or what for.


When i did

lsof -i | grep ESTABLISHED

this came up
deploy.akamaitechnologies.com ?

did a google and i still cant quite figure why this is happening, its slowing down my browser

 

[plinden]

deploy.akamaitechnologies.com doesn't really tell us anything - Apple uses akamai as a CDN (Content Delivery Network) for their software updates. All you're telling us is that something is downloading something from akamai in the background.

For instance, when I download e.g. the 10.6.7 Combo update, lsof shows multiple Safari threads like this:

Safari    28171 plinden   38u  IPv4 0x0f99c2f8      0t0  TCP     unknown9027e4e8f5b1:51957->a63-80-242-40.deploy.akamaitechnologies.com:http (ESTABLISHED)

What exactly is the response from the lsof command?

 

[colour]

this is still happening, is there anything else I could try

 

[plinden]

this is still happening, is there anything else I could try

Post the response from the lsof command I gave you?

We don't have enough information - the lsof command should tell us what's downloading if you give us just one line that contains the akamai connection.

 

[2rdmc]

Talk about a late reply, but since I stumbled upon this post (among a few others) while trying to fix a similar problem, thought I'd post an improvement that worked for me.

Generally, for unusually slow internet connectivity, nettop(1) is better than lsof for figuring out which process is choking the internet bandwidth. It is pre-installed and (crucially) shows realtime data transfer rate for each connection (which lsof lacks).

In the Terminal:
$ nettop
Then hit 'd' and look for entries with consistently large values in the 'bytes in' or 'bytes out' column. The 'd' instructs nettop to only show differences in each screen refresh.

Practical usage notes:
If you don't recognize the process name, Google it.

If you don't want the process around, get the pid (the number next to the process name in nettop), and kill it with "kill -9 <pid>". If that doesn't solve it, find out if you can politely tell the process to stop (for e.g. I logged out of AppStore, iBooks, iTunes and killed storeagent again).

If you're interested in what the process is doing over the network, use the client port number for a particular connection (e.g. '53133' from 10.0.0.1:53133->74.125.68.100:80) to run a tcpdump(1) on to see what packets are being exchanged: sudo tcpdump -nnvvXSs 1514 port 53133

If you're interested in who the process is talking to, but the destination IP address doesn't have a reverse DNS hostname (like in the previous example), then try visiting that IP address in a web browser as https://IP, click the broken lock icon in the address bar, and view the certificate details to find out which domain is served there (*.google.com in this case). This won't work if SSL port 443 isn't open on the destination.