Finding bandwidth hogging apps

[sswords]

I have a Droid X, and I got a nasty surprise after using it for a couple of weeks: I had gone through over 10 GB (not a typo) of bandwidth already, and earned a friendly call from Verizon telling me to shape up or they'd terminate my contract. Since then I've been running with background data turned off (settings -> data manager -> data delivery -> uncheck background data.) This works nicely and keeps my bandwidth down to usually a megabyte or so per day, preserves the battery, etc, but it seems like overkill. What I really want to find out is what was using so much bandwidth to begin with, and find a way to let my well-behaved apps run and update themselves, etc while preventing these bad ones from running.

Anyone know of a way to track bandwidth usage on an app-by-app basis? Is that even possible? Or, has anyone else run into a similar problem and found a way to solve it?

 

[RyanB]

Have you been streaming much? How about tethering?

 

[sswords]

I do some of that, but it's not the problem. With background data turned off, even if I watch some youtube or tether for some time, the bandwidth stays under control. As soon as I turn on background data, I'm using around 50MB per hour, for no good reason, it seems.

 

[BigMak2012]

I do some of that, but it's not the problem. With background data turned off, even if I watch some youtube or tether for some time, the bandwidth stays under control. As soon as I turn on background data, I'm using around 50MB per hour, for no good reason, it seems.

Yeah, tell me about it! I am going through the exact same problem and was wondering if you figured out a way to find out the offending app. Please let me know.

 

[lunatic59]

Give Watchdog Lite a try. It will give you a detailed review of your data use by app and network.

 

[RyanB]

Watchdog is pretty cool. I grabbed when Amazon gave it away, and use it more to watch what's hogging the CPU at times. It's pretty helpful stuff.