Bandwidth Usage

[Stevescat]

Anyone else experiencing on IDNET's site, the figures for bandwidth usage only go up to 13th of this month? My little darlings have recently been hammering my download allowance, so it would be nice to keep on top of the totals.

Steve

[Glenn]

Mine is showing up to 15th Steve, has the PC/Mac been rebooted since the 13th, if it has then drop them an email or give them a call.

[tehidyman]

Mine is showing zero up and zero down for 14th and 15th which is not correct.

[zappaDPJ]

Hmmm, my portal figures are also showing no activity since the off-peak period ended on Saturday morning. As I've hammered the net during the last 48 hours I suspect I'm in for a nasty surprise.

[zappaDPJ]

OK, I've check with support. Due to a system failure the figures being given for the last few days are incorrect. The hardware has been replaced but I've been informed that it may take a little while for the figures to feed through.

[Rik]

I've had nothing for my LLU line since Friday, and only peak figures for the BT line. For that matter, the plethora of BT messages on the network status feed seem to have gone too, with only 'manual' IDNet messages now being received.

[zappaDPJ]

The system that failed was responsible for more than one service so that might well explain things Rik.

[Rik]

True.

[Stevescat]

Thanks for the replies everyone. Glenn, I can't remember the last time I rebooted my Mac!

[andrue]

Mine is showing zero up and zero down for 14th and 15th which is not correct.

I only got connected today but I've been running speedtests and my router shows 1.4GB down. The control panel shows nada 

[Ardua]

I only got connected today but I've been running speedtests and my router shows 1.4GB down. The control panel shows nada 

It is not dynamic; ie, real time. Check tomorrow and you should see usage for today.

[Stevescat]

...except that it's playing up at the moment. 14th and 15th missing, 16th at zero!

[Steve]

I guess remaining that way would be too much to hope.

[zappaDPJ]

 

It's definitely not updating, I'm still not seeing any usage recorded via my portal.

[adamb]

OK, I've check with support. Due to a system failure the figures being given for the last few days are incorrect. The hardware has been replaced but I've been informed that it may take a little while for the figures to feed through.

Ahh, that would explain why my usage figures have been been higher than normal. I normally use between 0.8GB - 1.5GB a day on average but my stats show between 2GB - 4GB which I know is incorrect. I also log what goes through my router and Idnet's figures are usually around the same as my router reports. I have 40GB peak allowance which I have never gone over. This month I had used 30GB by the 15th.

[Stevescat]

adamb - surely it doesn't explain your situation because your data usage should be less not more than usual?

[zappaDPJ]

Just to clarify, and I can only speak for my own figures, in my case 'incorrect' equals no throughput being recorded at all. I have no idea if that will be the same for everyone though.

[Bill]

Mine seem OK, in reasonable agreement with PRTG I've got running on an old Windows laptop.

Very slow to load though, I was about to report that I was getting a blank space where the data should be!

[zappaDPJ]

Mine seem OK, in reasonable agreement with PRTG I've got running on an old Windows laptop.

Very slow to load though, I was about to report that I was getting a blank space where the data should be!

In the last few minutes my figures have just caught up

[Bill]

Looks like I just got lucky as to when I checked!

[adamb]

adamb - surely it doesn't explain your situation because your data usage should be less not more than usual?

Yes, it should be less. I assumed that the fault was recording higher figures than normal before the loss of feeds. I had noticed that the last couple of days were not logging. The stats have just updated and now I'm up to 39GB peak. I have apparently used 3.45GB yesterday. At the current rate of usage I will be looking at excessive bandwidth bill of around £45 (on top of my £35 a month package).

I have no wireless network so nobody is leeching off my connection. Nothing big has been downloaded, no updates, no gaming, no virus etc. I just don't understand. My usage pattern has been the same this month as any other month. I guess I'll have to dig deeper into my router stats. There doesn't appear to be any inbound DOS attacks or anything like that.

[adamb]

Ok, seems I may have found the issue.

Google Chrome seems to be using bandwidth at random times. I tend to leave my browser running on my hompage tabs (all static pages).

Networx is reporting that Chrome consumed 245MB (download) in the last hour. Netlimiter is also reporting quite a steady stream of data coming in. I have checked my extensions and it's not coming from those so I am guessing it may be a prefetching issue/feature with the browser.

Even as I type this I can see an inbound stream of 142Kb /s coming from Chrome whilst idle.

EDIT / The Solution:  OK, the fix is to disable Google Chrome Prefetching. Edit your Chrome shortcuts to "C:\Program Files\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --prerender-from-omnibox=disabled  (your path to Chrome may be different.)

You will also need to go to the settings and disable "Predict network actions to improve page load performance".
This should disable prefetching and save huge chunks of bandwidth. That is of course if you're using Chrome. Apparently, Firefox has a similar feature so you may want to look into that. So now, my usage has dropped to zero whilst idle.


It's a shame Google will not stump up for my excessive bandwidth bill That's going to really hurt the pocket next month. I'm really annoyed about all this. It's my own fault for not probing deeper before now.

This is from Google:
===========================

Predictions for network actions.
When you visit a web page, Google Chrome can look up the IP addresses of all links on the web page. Browsers use the IP address to load a web page, so by looking up this information in advance, any links that you click on the web page will load faster. Websites can also use prerendering technology to preload the links that you might click next.
===========================

Whilst the above suggests that it's just caching DNS lookups it also seems to be downloading whole webpages and their contents. So basically when you open your browser it will look through your history and then look at which websites you visit most and then fetch them all to the browser cache for faster loading. Not only does it do this but it seems to follow links and do the same thing to those pages. After a while of being idle it starts all over again :/ This is what I have observed when starting the browser and watching traffic flow via Netlimiter 3. The most visited website IP addresses popped up and spawned lots of connections which peaked up to 200Kb /s and lasted for up to a minute. DNS prefetching would use bytes rather than MB's. I'm waffling on now but I hope this helps anyone in the same boat.

Would it be worth me writing a sticky about this for the forum so that other users don't get caught out like me?

[Bill]

Ok, seems I may have found the issue.

Any objections if I link to that post from a tbb forum?

Excess bandwith usage isn't an uncommon complaint.

[adamb]

Any objections if I link to that post from a tbb forum?

Excess bandwith usage isn't an uncommon complaint.

No problem with that. Just hope it helps others. I am going through the same steps on 3 other PC's on the network right now Same issue

[Bill]

Thanks