[AccessD] A sad tale of wifi hotspot interference

Sun Oct 2 08:13:16 CDT 2022

Not the point my friend.  The point is that I had to find them as
problems.  And most of them I actually use, absent Edge and OneDrive.

I found an article pointing to the scheduler, and from there I started
looking at what all the tasks were, at which point I discovered that dozens
of things are pinging servers to check for updates.  I mean it is obvious
that they would (once I thought about that subject). What was not obvious
is that they would ping them so often.

But how often are they pinging, and how do I change the frequency.  The
answer to that was the scheduler.  All the jobs to cause the server checks
are right there in one place.  Dozens and dozens of scheduled jobs which
check for updates.

>From there I had to decide if checking every time I log in is insane, what
would be a sane frequency?  And some of these things have many tasks which
do the exact same thing.  Check in every time I log in.  Oh yea and every
day.  And when the computer is idle.  And every day of the week?  Some were
even 4 or five times a day!!!  REALLY?

So I had to just go through these scheduled tasks and do a major culling of
them.

So the point is that most of these things are actually useful and
occasionally used, but checking for updates 5 times a day is insane.  And
yes, I found one doing that.

On Sun, Oct 2, 2022 at 7:27 AM Arthur Fuller <fuller.artful at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Dear John,
> (Golly, I never thought I'd write a Dear John letter in my life, but when
> you're 75 you'll never know what'll happen next.
> Why don't you simply remove these bothersome pieces of software? It's not
> difficult.
>
> On Sun, Oct 2, 2022 at 7:00 AM John Colby <jwcolby at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Wow, just wow!!!  Things are never as simple as we expect.  Much more
> > startup data usage.  Tracked down a TON MORE, which are startup tasks for
> > everything that runs.  Pretty much every app that wants to update itself
> > sets a startup task.  Many of which run every day, every login, or even
> > whenever the computer is idle.  Google, Firefox, Edge, VS CODE, DropBox,
> > OneDrive, Office etc etc ad nauseum.  All of these going out to check if
> > they have any updates.  These are scheduled tasks, the task created by
> the
> > installer (or Windows if it is a windows app).  It's no damned wonder
> there
> > is a 10 minute burst of activity on my WAN connection every time I log
> in.
> > Which is my hotspot when I'm on the road.
> >
> > This activity is (at least when throttled?) about 600kbit/second, which
> > translates to about 4.5 mbyte / minute.  Which goes on for a loooong
> time.
> >
> > Office for example checks every time I log on.  On a day to day basis I
> may
> > not even use Office.  but hey, it is checking.  I NEVER use Edge.  But
> hey,
> > it is (was) checking.  I NEVER use OneDrive, but hey, it WAS checking.
> In
> > truth, over a wired internet I never cared.  But over my hotspot, which
> is
> > my norm now, I very much care.  We shall see how much of a dent I have
> made
> > in my hotspot usage.  As I mentioned previously, I was hitting my 15 gb
> cap
> > midway through my billing month.  All so Google etc could make sure it
> had
> > the latest updates 10 times a day.
> >
> > On Sat, Oct 1, 2022 at 1:34 AM John Colby <jwcolby at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > As some of you may know, I use my phone's wifi hotspot a lot.  I have
> > > Verizon and each line (phone) gets 15gb of data before being severely
> > > throttled, as in ~800kbit / second down.  Understand that my phone
> itself
> > > is not throttled, I have unlimited data directly on the phone.  Once
> > > throttled, just opening anything in the browser on the computer becomes
> > > excruciatingly slow.
> > >
> > > I don't watch youtube or other videos on my computer, doing so on my
> > > phone, exactly because of the above facts.
> > >
> > > For two months running, I was hit with wifi hotspot throttling about
> mid
> > > (billing) month.  WTF over?  I went on a quest to figure out why.
> Using
> > > task manager, and from inside of there using resource manager I
> > discovered
> > > that in any browser, videos often start playing as soon as I open many
> > > different web sites.  Usually these are advertisements, though not
> > always -
> > > I browse a lot of news sites and they want to feed me video to go along
> > > with the text.  I use mostly Firefox and so I figured out how to turn
> off
> > > automatic launching of video.  That helped immensely, but did not
> > entirely
> > > fix the problem.
> > >
> > > Believe it or not, Dropbox was a major contributor to the problem.  The
> > > updater (for updating dropbox itself, not the files stored in dropbox)
> > is a
> > > data consuming pig.  According to folks on the dropbox forum, since
> 2016
> > > (at least) people have been complaining about this, without any
> > meaningful
> > > response to the complaints, other than "you agreed in the EULA to let
> us
> > > update dropbox anytime and as much as we want."
> > >
> > > According to some folks, the updater.exe can consume hundreds of
> > megabytes
> > > a day.  I can't personally validate that claim but I will say I see
> > dropbox
> > > consuming hundreds of megabits / second essentially non-stop for long
> > > periods, so I have no reason to doubt that it adds up to a number like
> > that.
> > >
> > > Dropbox simply refuses to add any "manual update" option.  I can turn
> off
> > > the services and set them to manual, but the updater.exe still runs,
> even
> > > though it is not visible in the startup stuff in task manager.  The
> only
> > > way to disable it is to close it in task manager, then rename the exe.
> > > Reboot and... all is now quiet on my hotspot WAN.
> > >
> > > My Verizon billing cycle starts around the second and so I will get a
> > > fresh 15gb of data.  It will be interesting to see if these measures
> > solve
> > > my problems.  I will say that before this investigation I had a
> non-stop
> > > 600 kbit / second of wireless data traffic, and now I have zero
> > > continuous.
> > >
> > > Oddly, even editing a message like this in GMail causes continuous
> spikes
> > > of data, probably due to constant crap that gmail does as I write an
> > > email.  Stop typing and the data spikes stop.
> > >
> > > I used to think that 15gb was a lot.  Not any more.  I now open task
> > > manager and keep an eye on the wan usage while on my hotspot.
> Throttling
> > > is a royal PITA.  If there is no constant data being used by one of
> these
> > > data hogs, then ordinary browsing is easy and fast.  Not so much when
> > some
> > > app is grabbing 600k of my (throttled) 800kbps.
> > >
> > > If any of you have run into this and have other helpful suggestions
> > please
> > > do chime in.
> > > --
> > > John W. Colby
> > > Colby Consulting
> > >
> >
> >
> > --
> > John W. Colby
> > Colby Consulting
> > --
> > AccessD mailing list
> > AccessD at databaseadvisors.com
> > https://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd
> > Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com
> >
>
>
> --
> Arthur
> --
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>

-- 
John W. Colby
Colby Consulting