what is causing recent mac data use spike?
I have a Hughesnet internet data use limit of 15Gb per month which typically for my family is sufficient. As of last Thursday April 10 around 7AM my data use shot up and continued consistently high every hour. It started at 200 - 300 Mb / hour, jumped to ~550Mb / hour at 2AM 4/11/14, jumped again to 1 - 2 Gb / hour 7AM 4/11/14 and continued until all the data had been used ~9AM 4/12/14. I am using the Hughesnet utility to show what was used (after the fact) and I use Activity Monitor to what real time data use. I think it would be helpful to have a way of graphing the data use by process realtime if that exists so I can see what exact process is causing the data use. I do not have any virus software running.
As of Sunday 4/13/14 having no data left I contacted Hughesnet and began to troubleshoot the problem. I disconnected everything from the internet and shut down my wireless modem. All that has been connected since then (today is 4/16/14) is my iMac which is directly connected to my Hughesnet modem. I was given an additional 2Gb for troubleshooting. I left my iMac alone for 2 days. Very little data was used and almost no programs were running when I started using it again around 11:30AM 4/15/14. Unfortunatly, as my wife started using the iMac for a few hours that data use went up again and used up all the data. One thing i noticed was that the data use coincided with iMail being on.
How can i identify the problem and stop it?
iMac, OS X Mavericks (10.9.2)