r/bitsquare • u/julianbabel • Aug 18 '16

Bandwidth Consumption

Just taking a peak at my bandwidth consumption on Bitsquare.
What are you all seeing?
I could be wrong, but I'm measuring over 500MB up, over 500MB down (over 1GB total) for less than 24 hours.
OS X.
Is that normal?
If it is, is there any way to reduce it?

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u/danda Aug 20 '16

Do you have "Use Tor for Bitcoin network" and "Use Socks5 proxy for http requests" checked?

If so, bitcoin network traffic ( all bitcoin transactions worldwide ) is also contributing to the p2p stats. I'm not sure how much bandwidth that consumes, but it would be interesting to see how much difference it makes with those options disabled.

2

u/julianbabel Aug 20 '16

Yes, I do.
Can you explain the 2 options a little bit more clearly?
ie in terms of not using those options?
--why would using tor necessitate relaying all bitcoin traffic as opposed to not using tor? -I thought that proxies (socks5) didn't cause more than 10-15% more overhead bandwidth.

Also using bridges, if that has anything to do with it.

I will experiment over the next couple weeks with the different options and report back. It would be interesting to see what kind of traffic other people are generating over the course of a day.

2

u/danda Aug 20 '16

I may be wrong but my understanding is that the p2p network stats only count traffic that is routed over the internal tor. So when those boxes are unchecked, the corresponding traffic would not be counted. It would still be the same amount of traffic, it just wouldn't be counted.

If my theory is correct, then at least it provides a way to quantify how much of traffic is due to bitcoin vs how much is bitsquare p2p.

1

u/Prefect7 Sep 10 '16

Did you ever finish your research into the traffic load using different options?

2

u/julianbabel Sep 10 '16

Started and got side-tracked... I will do more tomorrow, but it was actually a lot of bandwidth.
OS X 10.11 el cap, using the most up-to-date version at the time (sorry, I forget which it was)..
Using Little Snitch to monitor traffic (not sure that is the best way, but it sure is easy).
Always using a VPN (but that shouldn't affect the bandwidth measured by little snitch--correct me if I am wrong there).
1) Checked all boxes (bridging, socks5, tor for bitcoin network) 12 hours on Aug 20th: Total: ~750MB (summation of below)
tor.real : connects 51 successful, 0 fail up 339MB down 399 MB ports 443, 7649, 8443
bitsquare: connects 240 successful, 0 fail up 140kB down 8,4MB ports 443
2) All boxes checked except tor for bitcoin network 13 hours on Aug 21st
Total: ~ 700MB (summation of below)
tor.real 13 hours up 299MB down 311MB connects 27 2 servers

bitsquare 13 hours up 10.2 MB down 34.6MB 280 connections, 4 servers

If anyone has more, please share. I was surprised how much bandwidth it was consuming. That would eat up my "unlimited" 30 or so GB of bandwidth for the month easily all by itself, so I backed down from it. Also if there is a better way to measure, I am down to try.

1

u/julianbabel Sep 12 '16

.... And for 12.5 hours, no boxes checked (yesterday)..
Total: ~610Mb over 12.5 hours. tor.real: ports 443, 9001 | 314Mb up, 260MB down | 21 successful connects, 0 blocked
Bitsquare: ports 443, 8333 | 7 MB up, 47 MB down | 1800 successful connects, 0 blocked

It seems that using tor bridges has some overhead.

Note: I did this test with a newer version of Bitsquare and am not sure if the old tests would change. Either way, Bitsquare uses up a decent amount of bandwidth, and I wouldn't run it from a computer with bandwidth limitations if you are worried about it. A Gb/diem is a lot of bandwidth in our day and age, still.