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find out what is downloading

J

joeyjojoe

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 20, 2003
197
0
Los Angeles, CA
i'm using menumeters, and it tells me i'm downloading something (at a pretty high rate, 20-30 kBps). i don't have anything other than safari open (and it keeps downloading when i close eveything). how can i find out which application is using the bandwidth?
 
Little Snitch monitors outgoing network traffic, alerting you and asking for permission before letting anything connects... and your computer has to send signals to start a download... so i would install it, turn it on, restart, and see what tries to get online.

pnw
 
this is getting bad. now the avg rate is up to 50 kB/s. i tried little snitch, but it says to turn the firewall on, and the firewall says that another firewall is running (throttled) so it can't turn on. i tried killing throttled, but that doesn't help, and after restarting it still says other firewall software is running.

this only started happening recently. i'm thinking it might be poisoned doing something, but i don't know why i would be receiving.

i also tried searching for files that were most recently modified, but alli get are some cache files in the Library.
 
Run "/Applications/Utilities/Process Viewer" and take a screenshot with "All Processes" selected. Maybe we can figure it out manually.
 
Is the mDNSResponder process staying at the top of the Process list?

If so, try this:

Open the Terminal and type the following:

Code: 
sudo /System/Library/StartupItems/mDNSResponder/mDNSResponder restart

Enter your user (administrator) password at the prompt.

I'm not sure if that's the problem, but give it a try. (mDNSResponder is the Rendezvous daemon process)
 
yeah i was thinking the same thing, and tried to kill it ... but then it just comes back, and in the meantime the downloading doesn't stop.
 
Also noticed the nfs daemons running -- any shared drives mounted/being used?

Other than that, I can't think of anything short of logging in/out or rebooting. I'm sure there's an easier method, but I'm too tired to think anymore...sorry! :(
 
Originally posted by joeyjojoe
this is getting bad. now the avg rate is up to 50 kB/s. i tried little snitch, but it says to turn the firewall on, and the firewall says that another firewall is running (throttled) so it can't turn on. i tried killing throttled, but that doesn't help, and after restarting it still says other firewall software is running.
Click to expand...

I had a similar problem with the built in firewall in OS X. It somehow was solved by downloading Brickhouse, installing, turning the firewall on in Brickhouse, and then turning it off through Brickhouse. Then when I went back into System Preferences, I could turn on the OS X firewall without a problem.

Not sure if this will help with your problem at all.

Random thought: Try running "top -u" in the Terminal and see if anything odd is using up processor time. Not sure if it will work any better than Process Viewer, but it's worth a shot.
 
One last thought -- as a last resort you could use "sudo tcpdump -i en0" or "sudo tcpdump -i en1" (whichever works) in the Terminal to see where the network packets are coming from.

But I don't recommend it unless you've exhausted every other option. ;)
 
top -u doesn't show anything different that i can understand. i'm hesitant to do a dump since it will be a pain to parse through it, and i probably still won't understand or know the cause.

anyone else have a suggestion? its not a virus or something, is it?
 
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