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emlynuk Author

Level 1

3 points

OCSP Service using up quite a bit of bandwidth

I have been tracking down an issue regarding our ISP bandwidth usage (very high).

I believe I have found an issue with the OCSP daemon (ocspd) using up quite a bit of bandwidth for no apparent reason - my initial tests seem to show that this daemon, under Mavericks, is using about 100MB of download bandwidth per day (approx 3GB per month). This is huge considering that this process is meant to cache retrieved results (assuming of course it is getting results).

As a further test, I had 2 Macs running Mavericks and 1 running ML overnight, with all machines running RubberNet to monitor per process bandwidth.

On both Mav machines, the ocspd daemon used up the traffic as per above but ML used no bandiwdth for the same process.

The implications here is that users with bandwidth limited connections (e.g. Satallite or Mobile) will use up much of their allowance when at idle hence my interest.

Can someone verify these findings?

Just a wild thought: Perhaps because the keychain is now sent to iCloud in Mav, I wonder if the certificates are being checked more often for security reasons.

Thanks

Emlyn

iMac, OS X Mavericks (10.9)

Posted on Nov 10, 2013 5:48 AM

130 replies

Drew Reece

Level 6

10,666 points

Dec 17, 2013 8:38 AM in response to Elrainia

Elrainia wrote:

I still can't believe there isn't more fuss about this. I've looked at a number of Macs belonging to other people and they're all doing it (needless to say the owners are all slightly appalled!). The only machine that I've not seen it on is my MBP which was the first machine I upgraded to Mavericks (not that that makes any difference!).

The Apple apologists on here say about 320 million people have 10.9 installed. If that is true this is probably an issue that only appears if you bother to monitor data usage (or have a data cap & notice the excessive usage etc).

There is a chance that it's a certain set of conditions that cause it too (such as certain combinations of migrated settings). I think the best we can hope for is enough people submit bug reports & it gets the attention of Apple.

It may be worth downloading the developer releases & seeing if they resolve the issue, Apple may be more likly bugfix if it is caught during the beta stage (just don't post details here because of the NDA).

Dec 18, 2013 2:35 AM in response to Community User

BryanQuigley wrote:

I only noticed it becuse I had a number of large downloads that month (including 10.9 itself) and my ISP sent a warning email about my data cap. Since the problem appears to be a seven second timeout on the client side I can't see how it would be difficult to fix.

BQ.

I had a similar experience and can't see the difficulty either. We must press Apple strongly on this.

K-Dee

Level 1

18 points

Dec 20, 2013 1:17 PM in response to emlynuk

I have had this issue and my bandwidtih usage has returned to normal. I've tried the suggestions here with no success but I installed 10.9.1 and that seems to have done the trick on both Macs that I own. Perhaps that fixed it or Apple made some sort of change on their end.

Can anyone confirm?

ascot97

Level 1

0 points

Dec 20, 2013 1:46 PM in response to K-Dee

K-Dee,

I installed 10.9.1 on December 17 and tested with:

OCSP : Best attempt

CRL : Best attempt

Priority : OCSP

The system immediately increased its download activity; back to the very high levels (50 - 100 MBytes/hour).

10.9.1 did not fix the problem.

Can anyone confirm that Apple has made a change that addresses this issue?

Dec 21, 2013 6:23 PM in response to ascot97

I think K-Dee is on the money...

I've now gone back to

OCSP : Best attempt

CRL : Best attempt

and there has been no overnight excess usage showing on my ISP account.

From my earlier post I'd have to agree that 10.9.1 did not [immediatly?] fix the problem however it now would appear that all is fine. Maybe the Apple mice have sorted the problem at their end and perhaps the release of 10.9.1 was/is just coincidental.

Can I have a $40 Gift Voucher please Mr Apple to compensate me for the extra bandwith I had to buy from my ISP while you sorted this out.

ascot97

Level 1

0 points

Dec 22, 2013 11:40 AM in response to K-Dee

K-Dee,

I can confirm from my own testing that this problem appears to be fixed. It seems the stelth-elves from Apple have been quietly working away at this. It's a shame Apple never let their users in on the secret.

Cheers everyone... and Merry Christmas!

Elrainia

Level 1

0 points

Dec 23, 2013 4:07 AM in response to ascot97

24 hours of testing on two machines and I'm happy to concur with K-Dee, stevefrombraddon and ascot97. I've seen no unusual traffic and I'm starting to feel that the problem is indeed fixed. Hooray!

And as ascot97 said - 'Merry Christmas' and thanks for the community support over the last month or so.

Dec 23, 2013 4:34 AM in response to K-Dee

10.9.1 installed on the 20th, have done a couple of reboots since, now set OCSP and CRL to Best Attempt, priority to OCSP. So far so good - no sign of the multi-MB downloads every time I inhale, so let's hope it's fixed.

Dec 23, 2013 1:07 PM in response to undertheappletree

With all users set to OCSP and CRL Best Attempt there is a periodic (~7.5 minutes?) blip in downloads - maybe Mail? - and ocspd only totalled <10kb for the past 12 hours. Looks fixed. Servers get a reboot tomorrow, so we'll see if that changes anything.

Dec 24, 2013 4:31 AM in response to undertheappletree

CONFIRMED!

Just got back from vacation and reverted back to

OCSP - Best Attempt

CRL - Best Attempt

Been running for over 12 hours with no unusual spikes.

I like stevefrombraddon's idea...

Apple, if you'd like to look through this posting and send us $40 gift cards to make up for our ISP overages, that would be a wonderful Christmas gift.

Dec 31, 2013 12:58 PM in response to bdiamond18

Just wanted to follow up with the folks on this post.

Everything has been fine since my last post until last night..... 28GB between 10pm and 2am!

Anybody else get a blip like this?

nancyhil

Level 1

8 points

Dec 31, 2013 2:20 PM in response to bdiamond18

No. My ocspd process shows 730kb of download in the past 5 days. But you've scared me enough to turn off CRL again. How critical is it that it be turned on, relative to the chance of wiping out my entire monthly allotment of Internet throughput in a short period of time?

Elrainia

Level 1

0 points

Dec 31, 2013 2:57 PM in response to bdiamond18

No problems here since the "fix" last week. Are you sure it was ocspd? 28Gb in 4 hours seems an awful lot of data compared to the patterns that were discussed earlier in this thread...

K-Dee

Level 1

18 points

Dec 31, 2013 3:24 PM in response to emlynuk

Except for my wife watching videos all day yesterday as she had nothing to do (which accounted for 4.5 GB of usage), nothing unusual here.

Dec 31, 2013 4:07 PM in response to Elrainia

I do not know if OCSPD was the culprit or not - I just have the basics monitoring my router and saw the traffic spike over four hours (10pm-2am). Nobody was doing anything (my wife and I went to bed early).

Maybe somebody hacked into my wifi... hope not!

OCSP Service using up quite a bit of bandwidth