Help! Mobile wifi being eaten up at crazy rate (Macbook Pro)

Bogof_Babe

I have a Huawei E5220 "dongle" (the free-standing type) on 3 mobile. Have had it for years with no problems. I have a 10GB per month plan, and generally use about 4-5GB.

This morning I switched on, and looked on the Huawei control tab that I always keep open, and noticed the usage was racing away even when I wasn't doing anything at all. It shows there is only one user connected to it, which would be me.

I've just switched on again and the same thing continues to happen. e.g. 152MB received and 20MB sent in 34 minutes. I can understand some of the received MBs (although not all that many) as I've googled a couple of things, but no way have I sent anything down the wires!

I don't know where to look on the Macbook's System Preferences to see if I can find out what is causing this. Can anyone help please? At this rate I'm going to use my entire allowance over the weekend!

Also, while typing this, it is buffering a couple of times. It doesn't usually do that.

Edited to add that the last few days I have had to reboot the dongle a few times a day as everything freezes and I lose connection, so don't know if that is connected to this other problem.

I_have_spoken

OS X Activity Monitor, Network panel?

fermi

Something syncing to the 'cloud' that you didn't intend perhaps?

Bogof_Babe

That's very impressive but I'm afraid it doesn't mean much to me, and I wouldn't even know where to find it .

Thanks though, I'll just have to keep checking my usage and switch it off if it goes any more berserk, I guess .

The worrying thing is that even when I'm not touching the keyboard it is still incrementing my usage. Background apps? How would I find out?

Bogof_Babe

fermi wrote: »

Something syncing to the 'cloud' that you didn't intend perhaps?

I have disabled wifi on everything else in the house, so goodness knows what it's trying to do.

fermi

Bogof_Babe wrote: »

That's very impressive but I'm afraid it doesn't mean much to me, and I wouldn't even know where to find it .

In Finder, under Applications, in the Utilities folder.

Activity Monitor

Bogof_Babe

Right, I've found something similar to what I have spoken posted above, but the headings are different (no mention of "packets").

The item with the biggest numbers by a long way against it is flash player safari internet. I wasn't aware that I was using any flash player. I'm just on this forum and another vBulletin forum similar to this, also a WordPress very small private forum. Apart from those and the Huawei tab nothing else is open, not to my knowledge anyway!

Bogof_Babe

Found the "packets" page now, under Network. Safari Networking seems to be incrementing at the fastest rate, but I'm not doing anything different to what I always do.

Quarter of a GB now used in an hour an a half of doing not very much .

How can it be networking when I'm the only user?

Bogof_Babe

Think I may have cracked it! There was an uninvited mobile film (or something) ad running in the background, which I didn't see until I minimised everything else. I closed it but it came back, I closed it again and now it seems to be gone.

Time to get me an ad blocker I think. Sorry to have wasted everyone's time, and many thanks for your help.

Bogof_Babe

Cancel that, it just died completely and wouldn't respond to a few attempts at rebooting, nor re-starting the computer. Now I've got it working again and it reckons it received 1.5MB in 50 seconds!

I'm going to put the SIM in a new Huawei E5151 that I bought a while ago, and see if that works. Need to charge it up first though...

pmartin86

Did you manage to reboot the computer? If so, do you have it to auto-re-open windows when you start up?

Click the apple logo in the top left of the screen and find the "force quit" option, select everything there (make sure you've saved any open work) and quit it all, this give you a clean slate to start with, does the activity monitor report usage now?

Macs have a habit of having open windows/programs persisting through "xing out of a program" and reboots (in some cases) so a background ad might have loaded that's continuing to draw data. If the above method fails to resolve the issue, more digging will be needed. Feel free to PM me.

Paul