Vivaldi using up all my bandwidth!

[bab5470]

My ISP has a bandwidth cap of 400GB per month. Normally this isn't an issue (I've never gone over). However last month I received an alert from my credit card that my internet bill was higher than normal. Signing into my isp's website I confirmed it was due to an overage.

I began investigating by installing an application on my router to determine my daily usage and which host was using the most bandwidth. That confirmed the ISPs info was correct, and narrowed the problem down to my main computer running ubuntu.

From there I used nethogs (a linux utility) and determined what's using all my bandwidth is Vivaldi. Here's a snapshot (note these totals only list how much bandwidth was used since I started nethogs):

As you can clearly see vivaldi is using the most bandwidth of any other processed by far. In fact I'm streaming music via spotify while nethogs is running and its a fraction of what vivaldi is using. I've monitored this over time to make sure no other process is using my bandwidth. Its always vivaldi.

Now I do have a TON of tabs (74 presently) open in vivaldi. They're all tumblr (an image blogging website). This isn't something unusual that I've recently started doing I've historically (for years) had Vivaldi open with this many tabs open and never had this issue.

Before you suggest I just close all my tabs please know that the tabs I have open are draft tumblr posts. So I'd lose all my drafts. I don't really want to do that. In fact I'd sooner switch browsers than having to close up my tabs.

It seems something has changed in the past month. That might be tumblr downloading more stuff in the background or maybe because I upgraded vivaldi itself (I'm using version 1.14.1077.60 (Stable channel) (64-bit) Revision: 44919e4fea5e7e6a209f00d1780f799bf211e559-).

I tried opening the vivaldi task manager and see if a particular tab was the culprit but sadly that just lists concurrent bandwidth not total bandwidth so its very hard to see if a particular tab is the issue as if I sort by bandwidth there are various tabs jumping to the top.

Is there a way to:

• See total bandwidth vs concurrent bandwidth in the vivaldi task manager. To get an idea if one tab in particular is causing the issue

• See if a particular extension using the bandwidth. I don't have many but I'm just wondering if one of them is misbehaving. In particular I have a tamper monkey extension installed with a script I've written myself. I am wondering if that's somehow using bandwidth. (I don't want to disable it because that's actively saving (local) copies of my tumblr posts)

• Tell vivaldi to block background tabs from making queries. To be clear I still want the tabs to load (so they load instantly when I click on them) but I just don't want them downloading content in the background.

Not sure how to continue forward with troubleshooting at this point. I would welcome any thoughts or input on how to approach this.

Thanks
Brad

[ModEdit] - Removed help from the topic title

[bab5470]

@bab5470 said in Vivaldi using up all my bandwidth!:

. That might be tumblr downloading more stuff in the background or maybe because I upgraded vivaldi itself (I'm using version 1.14.1077.60 (Stable channel) (64-bit) Revision: 44919e4fea5e7e6a209f00d1780f799bf211e559-).
I tried opening the vivaldi task manager and see if a particular tab was the culprit but sadly that just lists concurrent bandwidth not total bandwidth so its very hard to see if a particular tab is the issue as if I sort by bandwidth there are various tabs jumping to the top.

I decided to run debug tools on a random tab and I do see that tumblr is periodically polling in the background. Is there some way to block this?

I'm not sure if these polls could really add up to the sort of bandwidth usage I'm seeing (around 10-20GB per day!). That seems unlikely but maybe if there's enough polling going on in enough tabs, over enough time? I'm not sure.

[bab5470]

Same exact set of tabs open in Google Chrome at the same time as Vivaldi:

Yet Vivaldi is using 47x more bandwidth!! >:o

I am going to try to see if I can figure out how to downgrade.

[bab5470]

I disabled all my extensions and the situation is the same:

[mib2berlin]

@bab5470
Hi, it´s strange, my output with five tabs and 5 extensions (uBlock, AgentSwitcher, Stop Autoplay, Defender and ImTranslator) is:

Check https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/10388/refreshing-or-cleaning-your-profile

Cheers, mib

[lamarca]

@mib2berlin You came first.
I would suggest to run Vivaldi from the command line. It will not affect your system wide installation.

/usr/bin/vivaldi-stable --user-data-dir="/tmp/VIV-TMP" &

And check if the bandwidth usage is different.

[bab5470]

@mib2berlin said in Vivaldi using up all my bandwidth!:

uBlock

Creating a new user profile doesn't seem like its helped. I'm still seeing vivaldi using way more bandwidth than I'd expect it to (especially given I'm not actively doing anything with it - its essentially just idling and I'm watching it use more bandwidth than any other application on my system).

Meanwhile I also have Opera and Chrome open. Chrome isn't moving at all, Opera changes very little. Now it could be the specific content I have open in tabs, but is there no way to configure vivaldi to reign that in? Basically if the tab isn't in focus background content isn't allowed to load?

Note I still want the tab to load initially but then when it "finishes" loading (if its not the active tab) it shouldn't be allowed to mindlessly "eat" my bandwidth in the background. I'm thinking that this may be something in tumblr periodically polling their systems - maybe the combination of tabs cumulatively results this situation?

Although I don't understand why Chrome doesn't behave similarly if it was a tumblr specific problem. And why did this start recently?

[bab5470]

@mib2berlin

That's showing you current usage (KB/sec). Press m and it will switch you to Total MB.