Very occasionally when using my Mac, I notice my internet connection slowing down. Using Activity Monitor I can see that it's because something is downloading data at the full rate my connection can support — but I don't know how to tell what's responsible for it. It can be caused by several different things (Dropbox syncing; some app doing an automatic update; most recently it was a video buffering in a browser tab that I'd forgotten about) so it'd be really handy to have a way to tell which app is responsible for the network use. Is such a thing possible in OS X? Ideally I'm looking for a free solution. (Command line is OK.) I'm on Snow Leopard if it makes a difference.
How to tell which application is using the network
Network
Related Question
- IPhone – How to check which cellular network bands are supported by iPhone
- MacOS – Flaky DNS/connection issues when using Wi-Fi in Japan. Fifty-percent of page/images load if lucky
- I have the mac serving an application on port 80 that I can access within the network, how can I prevent it from sleeping
- When connected to two networks, can I tell the iMac to use a specific network for a certain application
- How to script Network Preferences using the CLI
Best Answer
You can try this
dtraceone-liner:Let it run for a while, then hit Control-C. It will print a summary of the number of bytes read from sockets, distributed among processes. For a more detailed view, replace
sumbyquantize. Or just to see a count of socket reads, replacesumbycount.Disclaimer: I have only tried this on Lion, but AFAIK no great changes in dtrace-ability have occured between SL and Lion.