Dear Lifehacker, I’m trying to get a handle on what is eating up my bandwidth allowance each month. My ISP provides a high level summary of how much bandwidth is consumed in uploads/downloads each day, but doesn’t provide breakdown of source/destination websites/IPs. Can you recommend some Mac OS X tools that will help me visualise how my bandwidth is being consumed? Thanks, Giga Hungry
Dear Giga Hungry
I’ve got to tell you – this one had me scratching my head but I think I’ve got something to help you.
There’s a Terminal command you can use that will monitor and display all inbound and outgoing traffic. The command you need is
sudo tcpdump -s 0 -A -i en2 port 80
the “en2” part is the name of the network connection you’re conencted to the Internet by.
To get the correct identifier, open the Netwrok Utility and go to the Info section. The dropdown list will display each of your available network connections and their identifiers.
When you’ve finished monitoring the traffic, press Control-Z to stop the trace.
I hope this helps.
Cheers
Lifehacker
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