How To: Monitor Your Internet Bandwidth Usage
Knowing how many gigabytes a month you’re using can be important if you have a metered internet connection, or your ISP measures your bandwidth and charges you if you go over. I know many Universities in the US have implemented bandwidth-overage charges (which students decry as unfair and stifling) to help combat bittorrent P2P filesharing, which will sap even a wide broadband connection. So, whatever your reason, you may want to see what applications are using bandwidth on your PC. The following instructions are for Windows XP / Vista.
The solution is to download and install NetLimiter 2 Monitor, a free application for bandwidth monitoring. If you like it, and want the ability to shape your internet traffic (limit the bandwidth used per application), you’ll need to pony up and buy the full version. Note that it uses the Win PCAP libraries to capture internet traffic, you may need to install them if you don’t already have them.
The main monitoring tab shows you how much you’ve uploaded and downloaded per application, in real time. For example, in my screenshot I refreshed the firefox tab I was working on, so you see Firefox using 99% of the activity. Steam, a gaming platform from Valve, is always chittering to their servers, so you see a .01 kbs from them.
The statistics tab is where it gets useful, telling me I’ve downloaded 95 GB this month, and uploaded 49 GB. You can also click on an application or time period and get detailed statistics across either of those dimensions. Fantastic!
Verizon FIOS High-speed Internet Review
Right now I’m having 15Mb / 2 Mb Verizon FIOS high-speed internet service installed. It’s $49 / mo but available in my new home in Staten Island. Time Warner’s road runner, which I had before, cost me the same after their 6 month introductory price expired, and only offered 7 Mbs down / 384Kbs up. They also had some service issues, occasional downtime, and once they “accidentally” physically disconnected my service.
FIOS is interesting, because it’s fiber optic high speed internet. This means they have to physically send people to your home to string fiber. The guys that are here now are nice, fairly professional guys. They strung black fiber down the hallway, drilled a hole in the upper corner of my studio room for the wire, and then strung and stapled the black wire around the room to where they’re going to connect it to their router-like endpoint. After that they just have to splice the wire they strung into the main system running into this building and I’ll have super fast internet.
Looking around the internet, all I see are glowing reviews:
- “Well I finally had FIOs installed at my house, and let me tell you it is well worth the money!” [src]
- DSL reports has 637 positive reviews to 22 negative, with six month rating of 85% [src]
- “If you can get FIOS, its definitely worth the time and hassle to switch. Dealing with their 800 number can be frustrating, but the service quality is still good.” [src]
- Macworld can’t shut up about how great it is, heh.
The bad reviews are hilariously empty of any real information or complaint, and read like bad trolls:
When it’s working, it’s nice … but right now my 14.4K modem over a noisy tin can string would have better throughput.
In a few minutes when it’s installed I’ll be able to run a speed test for you and let you know if FIOS can, in the short term, deliver the download speed it claims.
Update: It can. Not only does the NYC Speakeasy speed test report 10 Mb/s down and 1.8 Mb/s up, but a popular application like Azureus confirms that you can attain these speeds in real life. Don’t believe? Here’s the proof:
And that’s with a firewall turned on! Niiiice.
Slow DNS = Rubbish
There’s a CNET story running right now about how slow DNS is the bane of a fast connection. They write:
“We hear stories about carriers spending billions of dollars to build new fiber-to-the-home networks or 3G (third-generation) wireless networks,” said Paul Mockapetris, inventor of the DNS architecture and chairman and chief scientist at Nominum. “But broadband providers should also spend some money adding more DNS capability. Pure bandwidth doesn’t solve the problem if the DNS servers can’t respond quickly.”
However, there’s one simple reason why DNS speeds don’t actually matter: caching. Say that an uncached DNS query takes 250ms:
-bash-3.00$ time nslookup apple.com
real 0m0.227s
Then, for every web domain we browse, we incur a one-time hit of 250ms. It doesn’t matter how many times we visit the site after that–the DNS work is already done and saved for future use. Every now and then, our computers will check to make sure the DNS is up to date, and we won’t notice that minor penalty. As for games, the DNS resolution is the just the barrier to establishing a connection. Once that connection is up, no more DNS is done. And, with threading, as your game is loading in one thread, the DNS can be resolving in another thread, essentially taking up no real time at all; just waiting for the DNS resolver Sockets to unblock.
