John F. Braun Company Link : Eloquent Software
Product Link : StreamWatcher 1.1 ($15 Shareware)
Having a high speed Internet connection can make tasks such as surfing the web, retrieving email, listening to music or watching video a pleasant experience, but there may be times when you are just asking too much from your connection, and things aren’t as snappy as you’d expect. Sure, you can use a tool like the built-in Activity Monitor to view total upload and download bandwidth, or a UNIX command like netstat to view individual connection, but they really don’t help present the big picture. Enter StreamWatcher.
StreamWatcher displays a widow which shows all network connections between your Mac and other computers, be they on your local network, or on the Internet. For each connection, or stream, it displays the protocol being used (TCP or UDP) the source machine and port, the destination machine and port, the current upload and download speed in bytes per second, and the lifetime upload and download speed in bytes per second. Clicking on a heading in the window will sort on that item, so you can easily identify bandwidth hogs and who they are talking to.
StreamWatcher Shows Network Connections and Bandwidth Use
The preferences allow you to modify the behavior of StreamWatcher, so you can change the list update interval (default of 1 second) and the amount of time to remove an inactive stream (default of 10 seconds). You can also ask to resolve hostnames (default of on) as well as resolve service names (default of off). The preferences also let you customize the format of the data to be written to a log file. There’s a summary feature that will show total streams, total current upload and download bandwidth, and total lifetime upload and download bandwidth. You can filter the output based on a search string. Finally, you can pause, resume and refresh the monitoring of the streams.
So learn who your Mac is talking to, and how much bandwidth it’s using, and check out StreamWatcher today! Have any other gadgets that let you see what’s happening on your network? Send an email to John and he’ll get down with it.
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From the screenshot, it looks like there may be a bit of a connection with the lsof command. Don’t get me wrong - that’s not a bad thing. But what would make me sit up and pay close attention is missing.
What I want to be able to identify is not simply the various different connections, etc. I want to know to which active local application, utility or system process the connection is attached. I run Menu Meters for general network activity monitoring. Occasionally, I see that my connection is running flat out and I want to know what process is involved - because I’m maybe not running anything that should be active on the network. That sort of mystery activity needs a good explanation.
Apologies to Eloquent Software. This seems a bit unfair. I don’t mean to criticise this application since it doesn’t claim to do what I’m after in the first instance, so please don’t take my comments the wrong way. But if they can work that out, they’ll have a new customer.