Need traffic metering software for OS X.

Pheezer

Okay, I'm lazy and I don't want to solve this for myself. There, I admitted it. Now let's move past that.

I'm going to be upgrading to a smartphone soon. I need to figure out if the base 500 MB plan will be enough. The way I'd like to try to estimate this BEFORE signing up for anything is to start tracking how much traffic I generate by web browsing on my laptop. I need to just track browsing activity in the browser, not any other kind of traffic (IM is free so won't contribute and I won't be using bit torrent :P).

Is there an easy answer here?

This is important as I feel that if I shoot waaaaaaaaay past 500 I might need a device with wifi. I WILL be taking into account the fact that I'll browse far less than I do with my laptop, but I just want to get a feel for where I'm at right now.

Trentus

Well, a quick google search found SurplusMeter, but I'm told that it meters local network traffic as well, so that could debase your results. Pretty sure you can tell it to pause metering for a while though. You'd just have to remember to start it again.

If your ISP provides you with a page where you can check how much traffic you've pulled down, sent up, there are a couple of firefox addons that will log into the page and pull the data for you (there was one which had some heavy development on the whirlpool forums which had a way to add a profile for your ISP's information page. Can't for the life of me find it at the moment though).

Mmmm... Cocks...

I always just type what I want in download.com and usually something nice shows up.

Linden

There's actually a builtin graphical system for the overall meter in the Network pane of Activity Monitor.app. Resets on reboot. Restricting measurement to just the browser is a little trickier - but estimation should be easy.

Ego

500 megs gets eaten up pretty quick (even on a smartphone) if you're planning on browsing with it regularly. It's suprising how many sites are multi-meg now, just going off the iPhone's built in monitor.

Echo

Ego wrote: »

500 megs gets eaten up pretty quick (even on a smartphone) if you're planning on browsing with it regularly. It's suprising how many sites are multi-meg now, just going off the iPhone's built in monitor.

Yeah. Even the most minimalistic-looking site in the world can shove a meg of javascript at you.