Discovering Network Hog

[Nagarjuna]

I always have Conky running to monitor system performance and I've noticed that my download rate is quite high, actually between 800KB/s and 1MB/s. To try to get to the bottom of this, I downloaded a neat little tool called 'NetHogs' which dynamically lists your processes that access a network and what their up/down rates are.

I ran NetHogs after a fresh reboot. All I've done is run startx to start OpenBox, tint2, feh, conky and xterm. I'm also running Chromium while I type this.

Here are the results:

# nethogs
Chromium / Sent: 0.039 / Received: 0.026
Unknown TCP / Sent: 0.000 / Received: 0.000

And that's pretty much it! Now I just need to find out what's downloading the rest of the data.. Unless Conky is just spewing non-sense. Might I be able to do this using the /proc directory or maybe using netstat? I'm investigating these methods at the moment.

I'd like to add that it isn't always like this. Earlier today I would barely go over 300KB's (and I had rtorrent open).

If you have any ideas or tips please share

[MikeTbob]

You can probably find out even more with the netstat command, it'll list even Xorg connections, which might be what you are seeing above.

netstat -a

See the help page with

netstat --help

[Nagarjuna]

Sweet. The day has come where I can actually use and learn about netstat for solving a 'real-life' issue!

Thanks, Mike. Oddly enough, my down speed is at 322KB/s now with rtorrent running capped at 300KB/s. So what ever was doing all that downloading appears to be in hiding.. For now..

I'll keep you posted on what I find out.