Network usage monitor

[benz]

I am looking for a simple utility that will give me an idea of how much bandwith is being used by each program running in the background.

Basically my problem is that I cannot figure out what is causing my wireless icon to blink so rapidly, when I (seemingly) have everything closed that accesses the internet. Sort of like how you can open up Task Manager and see which programs are using CPU (and sort by top usage, etc) I would like something that can tell me which programs are using network bandwith (originating from my PC).

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance...

[Elhabash]

You can use Kerio Personal Firewall, for instance. I also like it's firewall functionalities.

It can warn you each time an application tries to connect to the outside (and you can make it ignore individual applications), which is also nice to give you an idea about what kind of traffic is happening when you don't think of it...

[level]

You can use the command line tool 'netstat' to show all your network connections. Tie the results in with Task Manager and you can determine the process behind the connection. You could also try tcpview, which does basically the same thing. Find tcpview at sysinternals.com :

http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/source/tcpview.shtml

from their website:

"TCPView is a Windows program that will show you detailed listings of all TCP and UDP endpoints on your system, including the local and remote addresses and state of TCP connections. On Windows NT, 2000 and XP TCPView also reports the name of the process that owns the endpoint."

I don't think you'll find a free graphical viewer for Windows.

[jdhurst]

CommView for Windows does exactly what you want. Not free (by any stretch), but there is homeowners license that limit the number of simultaneous connections being monitored (5, I think). I see quite a bit of traffic between my laptop and the Netopia (router/Access Point) gateway (but not going out to the internet). You could also try Ethereal for Windows. That is free and quite decent, although I like CommView better. You need to also install WinPcap (no issue there - I am using the most recent Beta). ... JDHurst

[benz]

Thank you all for your replies. Right now I am just using "netstat -o" so I can see the PID attached to each connection, and then match that up with task manager. I might get around to installing some of these utilities a little later, so thanks for the suggestions!!