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macrowe

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 17, 2010
5
0
After installing 10.8 blowing through constant bandwidth – using little snitch looks to be 'helpd' downloading something?? It uses around 50-70 mb/hour and this is for each user. I have 3 (usually logged in) and each one of these uses the same bandwidth resulting in 150-200 mb/hour. I have limited bandwidth and this is an issue. Logging everyone out fixes this but is annoying. Any ideas?
 

monkeybagel

macrumors 65816
Jul 24, 2011
1,142
61
United States
After installing 10.8 blowing through constant bandwidth – using little snitch looks to be 'helpd' downloading something?? It uses around 50-70 mb/hour and this is for each user. I have 3 (usually logged in) and each one of these uses the same bandwidth resulting in 150-200 mb/hour. I have limited bandwidth and this is an issue. Logging everyone out fixes this but is annoying. Any ideas?

Were these machines upgraded from Lion? If so, is this problem new to Mountain Lion? I would recommend installing a packet sniffer on the network and see what you can find. Wireshark works well for this.
 

Comeagain?

macrumors 68020
Feb 17, 2011
2,190
47
Spokane, WA
Could be icloud related, assuming you have it enabled.

Nope.

Helpd is the process the Help utility uses to download and update the help articles. If you need it to stop downloading information you can use Little Snitch to block it. The only downside it that your help articles may get outdated, but I don't find them particularly useful, anyway.
 

macrowe

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 17, 2010
5
0
Have blocked with little snitch - hope 10.8.1 will sort it. Cheers
 

macrowe

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 17, 2010
5
0
It did until I restarted as it seems the rule gets overridden. A solution that works (little drastic) is to remove the helpd out of its folder on all users. Fixed it and OS still seems to be working just fine. Path is /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/HelpData.framework/Versions/A/Resources/helpd

Probably should keep the helpd file incase it causes problems for you, oh and I think when I updated my OS again, it put it back in, and blew through a tonne more bandwidth until i noticed. There is probably a better solution out there and would appreciate another option but after that bill I got anything that works is just fine with me. Hope it helps and if you find anything else, please let me know. :)
 
Last edited:
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