Cumulus Support

I had a shocker the other day when I got a notice from my ISP that I had reached 75% of my plan's limit (after just 18 days in the month). My Upload is always between 400 and 500 MB per day and downloads had varied from 250 to 700 MB per day with a monthly usage between 25 to 43 GB and my plan allows 80 GB per month.

However it seems that from Jan 3rd the upload has continued the same but my downloads have increased from a low of 2,200 to a high of 5,300 for a total of between 2,600 to 7,100 GB per day, a ten fold increase. I called my ISP provider and they suggest I run Cucusoft Net Guard to monitor the usage. I have been doing that for a couple of days. It so happens that the day I called my ISP the usage went to 234 MB download and 384 MB upload and the next day 678 download and 419 MB upload. I will see what today brings.

In monitoring the Cucusoft console nothing abnormal seems to show but do see that cumulus.exe is constantly downloading at between 0.01 to 5.4 KB/S. The other regular/intermittent downloads I can identify such as the Cumulus Realtime Data Grabber for the realtime.txt, iexplore.exe when I have browsers open, javaw.exe for Yawcam , FWI when it does a process, CumulusToolbox.exe which I assume is some of my scheduled tasks, and occasional others like TeamViewer. Cumulus.exe is the only program constantly downloading.

What would be the purpose or cause of the cumulus.exe constantly downloading?

p.s. My ISP has said they will credit for the over-the-plan additional usage on a one-time basis while I search to determine the high download usage.

Paul

Cumulus doesn't download anything. However, by the nature of internet protocols, any uploads also incur incoming traffic. So your realtime.txt uploads and WU rapid fire (and any other realtime uploads) together will be causing almost continuous incoming traffic. FTP in particular is a very inefficient protocol. I have no idea how much that would amount to altogether in terms of bytes/sec.

I'm running Windows Resource Monitor and looking at cumulus.exe (I had a look at the cucusoft thing but didn't like the fact it wanted to install a whole load of other stuff and I didn't trust it not to install them anyway).

I upload realtime.txt, realtimegauges.txt, and realtime.xml every 5 seconds. I don't use WU rapid fire. The 'receive' bandwidth for Cumulus is about 80 bytes per second. The 'send' bandwidth is about 500 bytes/sec. If I turn on WU rapid fire, that goes up to about 100 up and 600 down.

You do have a USB logger rather than an IP logger, yes?

Thanks again Steve, and I am fine with the Cumulus bandwidth as with the others that I know of. Yes I have the USB and not IP logger.

Cucusoft was suggested by my ISP Support, and they did in fact trick me into downloading other stuff which I was quickly able to remove through Windows Control Panel uninstall files.

Paul

What does Resource Monitor show for cumulus.exe? It shouldn't be too far off what I'm seeing, I wouldn't have thought.

From Task manager, Processes for Cumulus:
CPU: 0.3 to 1.1%
Memory: 116.1 to 116.2 MB
Disk: 0.1 to 0.2 MB/s
Network: 0.1 Mbps

Paul

I too just recently found a lot of unexpected traffic on our account (fortunately much of it is not charged for!).

Have just downloaded and installed a program called NetBalancer (free (seems it is not really free!) and paid for versions available) on my XAMPP dev webserver which is now on a better PC and also runs Cumulus - one decent but not new machine instead of two!
NetBalancer displays a lot of detail and has a service component that just keeps logging as long as the PC is running.

My system uploads to two websites - Saratoga and Cumulus.
As Saratoga is our main site graphs are only uploaded to the Cumulus site once per day and a subset of the graphs (most of them) are uploaded to the Saratoga site at each interval (tagtime).
Cumulus uploads the standard stuff to the Saratoga site and ncftpput uploads the standard stuff to the Cumulus site, plus all the nonstandard stuf to both sites. ncftpput is handling around 8 times as much data as Cumulus.
Cumulus also uploads to WU, CWOP and PWS at tagtime.
Realtime is 15 secs
Tagtime is 10 mins.

It appears the realtime download is marginally higher than the upload - this is overhead and data about the session (the stuff you can see in the logs?).
Realtime (total for both sites) is ~0.5kb each time for upload and for download.
Tagtime data for both sites is around 245kb - this is mostly graphs and the upload is ~ 245kb while the download (overhead) is about the same as it is for Realtime.

PaulMy wrote:From Task manager, Processes for Cumulus:

Resource Monitor will give better figures than Task Manager.

I found Resource Monitor (went into areas never ventured before) and cumulus.exe
CPU: from 0.90 to 1.05%
Network: from about 330 Send (B/sec) and 50 Rec, to 5,350 Send and 235 Rec which would be around the 5 min interval upload I think.

The Cucusoft monthly Broadband Usage statement (for this time only from Jan 29 in the evening to month end - about 52 hours) shows
iexplore.exe at 1.49GB download and 28.41MB upload
svchost.exe at 62.36MB download and 19.85MB upload
cumulus.exe at 26.76MB download and 448.51MB upload
Cumulus RealTime Data Grabber.exe at 7.3MB download and 45.21MB upload
javaw.exe at 3.05MB download and 139.6MB upload (for Yawcam I think)
and these are the top 5 usage

I appreciate the information Steve on the Cumulus (FTP) download and I see the other programs I use with FTP show similar pattern. Cumulus does various extra file uploads for awekas, cloudbaseCU, consoles, gauges-ss, BT Sager Weathercaster, Saratoga and Leuven templates, my own extra pages, etc. so it does most of my ongoing FTP, and all working excellent I might add.

Jan 28 I had 3,531MB download and 475MB upload before I became aware of the high usage
Jan 29 was 234 down and 384 up
Jan 30 was 678 down and 419 up
Jan 31 was 2139 down and 414 up (I was home all day and quite active on the internet)

Paul

Hi Paul,

For you info I can confirm that "Cumulus RealTime Data Grabber" does the following file transfers:

Downloading
File: realtime.txt (from either a local location i.e. c:\cumulus\realtime.txt or remote location i.e. from a FTP site)
Download frequency: user defined, options available are: 15sec's, 30 sec's, 45 sec's, 1min, 3min, 5min, 10min, 15min, 30min, 1hr, 2hr, 4hr



Uploading

Webpage files

Upload frequency: every 15 minutes non variable
Files: Screen shot of webpage files that get uploaded to users remote FTP site


Prediction log and associated files

Upload frequency:
HISTORIC logs, once a day just before midnight.
Daily prediction logs, uploaded every 15min, when main webpage files get uploaded.
Files: Screen shot of webpage files that get uploaded to users remote FTP site Side Note:

I have kept all the graphic image files as *.png to keep them as small as possible.
Also the other HTML and txt files are small as well. The only ones that will grow
in size would be the *HISTORIC.txt files that the data gets appended to each day.

Regards

Mark

Thanks Mark that is also useful information.

I am still monitoring and am getting a daily statement from Cucusoft that shows the up and downloads for each .exe file for which there are about 30. Most are just some KB per day so no impact to my current plan's limit. My uploads of about 300 to 400 MB per day are no problem and these seem to be pretty stable. So far what I have been able to see is that my downloads are all quite reasonable and stable (Cumulus.exe at about 12MB, Cumulus RealTime Data Grabber.exe at about 3MB and B-L Sunrecorder at about 6MB) except for iexplore.exe which can fluctuate a lot, but not sure how it got into a range all of a sudden in early January from 3 to 6GB per day earlier in January when before it was always way under 1GB. I don't do movies, gaming, etc. except for the odd YouTube that is linked to forum posts or news pages. By monitoring it with Cucusoft I hope to at least identify when it occurs and the source.

I have CRTDG get the realtime.txt from remote location, would there be any issue to get it from my c:\Cumulus ? i.e. potential conflict with the frequent realtime saving/uploading by Cumulus. This is not a big amount for bandwidth and not sure of any other computer resource impact.

I am still pretty well all IE user. As iexplore.exe seems to be by far the largest download user is there any difference in bandwidth with using other browsers?

Paul

Depends what version of IE you are using but if it's IE9 or later if you hit F12 and use the network functions and start capture you can see what the browser is uploading and downloading in kbytes and time.

Silly question, but if this is a sudden increase you haven't got someone piggy-backing on your connection have you? But then I just thought this is your hosting service isn't it not your ISP, so that is a silly question !!

But then I just thought this is your hosting service isn't it not your ISP

It is my ISP so your question is a good one. No issues with hosting from Godaddy that I am aware of. I don't believe there would be any piggy-backing here in our small village residential area (we know all our close by neighbours) and I am password protected. I'll try F12 and add it to my monitoring practise.

Thanks for the suggestion,
Paul