Is farmville to blame for eating all my internet bandwidth?

Flat_Eric

I used to be a bit of a fan of Farmville and Cafe World so when I found out a friend was playing Farmville 2, I thought I would give it a go....

Fast forward a couple of weeks and we discover the reason why our internet has been running so slow this last week is that we have gone over our monthly download allowance by a massive massive amount.

I immediately suspected farmville and thought oops.... but can it really be that?

What is puzzling is that when you look at the breakdown for our internet usage, the largest download is for peer to peer sharing .... this I understand is when you download / share music - which we don't do.

Does anyone have any ideas ? for info, we both run Linux on our computers - not Windows.

I also own an internet radio and although this is plugged in - it hasn't been used in a few weeks.

spannerzone

Farmville on my wife's tablet certainly ate through data, it appeared to consume about 20MB of data in an hour- I only found this out when the 3G data sim she used was using up it's 1GB per month data allowance in a few days (she used to take the table to work and play the game at lunch)

So I'd say it's quite possible it's eating up your allowance if you're on a light usage package..on Plusnet I get a breakdown of usage and it only shows ours as Internet and streaming, not P2P.

Alternatively if you have wireless check it's secure and not letting the nextdoor neighbour download music/video etc!

chickywiggle

looking at this - I'd go for gremlins rather then farmville.

My suggedtion is download a spyware/ adaware app. I bet farmville (or something) has put something on your computer which is uploading data without you knowing.

spannerzone

On a Linux computer though? maybe there's some other crud installed but not seen this on the wife's PC running Farmville.

On an unrelated note, do any other husbands find they've lost their wife to Farmville? I think there must some subliminal stuff going on there!

Lifeforms

What are the figures you're talking about. Massive massive to one is small small to another. What's your monthly limit, and how much did you go over?

Any kids? secure wifi? Changed the wifi password? What security are you on? Scanned all computers for spyware/malware? (see the sticky in this forum section for programs to use)

Also prolific catchup tv uers? look at lots of picture sites, or you tube? How much Farmville daily?

Flat_Eric

Thanks for all your replies.... :j

We checked the mac addresses of the various devices that access our wi fi to check what was on the list matched the devices we use. At xmas and other times, family have visited and they have been added - and forgotton about so all mac addresses we couldn't match up have been removed.

Linnux is apparently more secure than windows. so the possibility of a bug or bot or similar having made it on to our computers and doing naughty things is unlikely but not impossible. However that's beyond me so I'll leave that for the OH to investigate.

In the meantime, I've gone cold turkey with farmville which I'm about :rotfl: especially as my sunflowers will be ready for harvesting now.

The only difference with farmville 2 and farmville is that you can have community neighbours so you can have farm friends that are not your facebook friends and although I visited their farms and accepted help from them on my farm, that was as far as the friendship went...

I would like to think that if farmville 2 was to blame then the internet would be full of complaints but there only appear to be a few. However it can't be ignored that the days when our internet download was really high, were the days I was probably playing FV the most. although that doesn't explain why the internet download is showing as peer to peer.

My other suspect was my internet radio but I haven't used it in weeks although it was showing on the wi fi list as connected....

It isn't impossible that someone hasn't tapped in although we couldn't see any evidence of this when we looked at the various mac addresses associated with our wi fi last night.

we have had an engineer at the bottom of our road earlier in the week playing around with the bt/internet box/cupboard - this has fueled our imagination that wires have been crossed somewhere) but I'm remain cold turkey with FV for the moment and see what happens.

Flat_Eric

Lifeforms wrote: »

What are the figures you're talking about. Massive massive to one is small small to another. What's your monthly limit, and how much did you go over?

Any kids? secure wifi? Changed the wifi password? What security are you on? Scanned all computers for spyware/malware? (see the sticky in this forum section for programs to use)

Also prolific catchup tv uers? look at lots of picture sites, or you tube? How much Farmville daily?

I don't have the figures in front of me but if I remember correctly it was over 20GB last Saturday and high on Friday.
No kids and yes we have changed wi fi password. Computers haven't been scanned for spyware/malware but we will be doing this.

Rare for us to watch tv on the i-player. you tube - odd things but nothing excessive - odd thing now and again.

Lozzy88

spannerzone wrote: »

On an unrelated note, do any other husbands find they've lost their wife to Farmville? I think there must some subliminal stuff going on there!

After myself and my bf ot using facebook for 3 years we have both reactivated our accounts, I have lost my male partner to farmville I am starting to get in to sugar crush am just glad there's 30 mins between lifes lol

Lifeforms

It could be down to farmville 2 playing, but you would be needing to be playing an absolute ton to max 20GB in one day (if that's what you've said) I doubt you'd have the time on it. 20GB is equivalent to hours and hours on catch up tv which can be heavy usage.
As it is peer to peer it's likely to more be downloading/uploading on likes of Torrents. Check to see if you have any torrent programs running.

Who is the ISP, as some ISP's do have "problems" in reporting usage, especially on light users of small monthly limits of say 10GB a month.

Flat_Eric

Lifeforms wrote: »

It could be down to farmville 2 playing, but you would be needing to be playing an absolute ton to max 20GB in one day (if that's what you've said) I doubt you'd have the time on it. 20GB is equivalent to hours and hours on catch up tv which can be heavy usage.
As it is peer to peer it's likely to more be downloading/uploading on likes of Torrents. Check to see if you have any torrent programs running.

Who is the ISP, as some ISP's do have "problems" in reporting usage, especially on light users of small monthly limits of say 10GB a month.

we are with plusnet.
I don't know what package we have with them though.

Dave_C_2

Been a while since I played with Linux and it's highly unlikely that you have been virused. However you can do some investigations

1. Interrogate router* using your browser and make a note of time and up/down usage
2. play farmville for an hour
3. re-interrogate router and calculate farmvlle usage

* depends on the router but typing 192.168.1.1 works for many routers.

Now get a back ground figure as above, leave router for an hour but do nothing PC wise - should not use any bandwidth

Also there must be a Linux bandwidth monitor that you can use (here my Linux expertise runs out) to get a live usage figure.

HTH (a bit) Dave