Product Link : Rubbernet (15-day demo, 29.99€)
Company Link : Conceited Software

Having an Internet connection is great. Unfortunately, many applications that connect to the Internet aren’t very smart about how much bandwidth they use, in that they’ll often consume all available bandwidth. This can be an issue if you share your network connection with others, but can even be an issue for a single user when you’re expecting bandwidth and you don’t know who is using it. Sure there are utilities can can show your total upstream and downstream bandwidth, but this can’t identify the specific culprit. Enter Rubbernet.

Rubbernet will show all of the application and services on your Mac that are using the network. Some of them are expected, such as Safari and Mail, but some of the other items listed may be ones you hadn’t thought about, such as Push Services or MobileMe. In the Summary view for each application that is found, you can see the name, status (active, inactive or idle) the user that owns the application, current download rate, current upload rate, total data in, total data out, and time of last activity. There is also a connections view, which will show the remote host, port, application, user, download rate, upload rate and last activity, so you can get very specific.

Rubbernet Summary View

Clicking on a specific application will show the aforementioned connections items, but only for that application. You can also click on a user, and it will show the connection items that belong to that user. The preferences allow you to enable or disable IP address resolution.

Another nice feature of Rubbernet is that when first launched, it will offer to install the Rubbernet daemon on your machine. The next time you launch Rubbernet, it will allow you to monitor the traffic on any machine that has the Rubbernet daemon installed. This is a great feature if you want to see the bandwidth being consumed by another machine on your network.

So, find out who’s hogging your bandwidth, and check out Rubbernet today! Have any other gadgets that let you see what’s happening on your network. Send an email to John, and he’ll check it out.