Animated usage bars on the graph

I want to thank you for this wonderful program. I've been hooked on it since 2012.

Can you explain what the animated usage bars represent to the right of the large graph?

At first, I thought they simply tracked instantaneous usage, but they don't seem to follow the right side of the polyline as it moves in from the right, nor do they have units. Then I thought they might track the amount of usage above or below some moving-average usage (such as the numbers 'D:' and 'U:' below the graph), but the bars rarely go below 50%. Finally, I supposed that they might track the rate of change of usage, but again, they mostly stay above 50%.

Please shed some light on this feature - it's been driving me nuts.

Thanks!

Only Andrew knows for sure but I think that the bars simply show the relative activity of Up and Down, with an instantly varying scale from bits to megabits and back again. Cute to highlight that there's activity but not of much practical use other than they're big enough to draw your attention to the graph.

You can always turn them off if they're really bothering you.

J

That's right, there isn't much point in using them (though some users like it). They merely show any activity relative to a maximum in the last 5 seconds.

Well, geesh. And I was trying to find such deep meaning in the motion of the bars. I've had them enabled since I first installed the program. They hadn't bothered me until now. I'm beginning to wonder, though.

How do you derive the numbers at the bottom next to the letters 'D:' and 'U:'? Are they some average of the last five kbit/s samples of less than one second taken once per second or are they the total number of actual kbits transferred over the last five seconds divided by five??

The primary purpose of the program is to measure the 'usage' i.e. total up and download bytes expressed as bytes, KB, MB or GB.
This is useful to verify that your ISP is billing you correctly.

The secondary purpose is to show the "speed", which may be constant or may vary all over the place depending on: the plan that you subscribe to with your ISP (speed), how many users are sharing the local resources of your ISP, the speed of the 'other end' (some servers are faster, some are slower, it's usually an economic constraint), the number of 'hops' between you and the server at the 'other end', the type of service: copper, fibre and types of cellular: CDMA/2G/3G/4G-LTE (atmospheric conditions if you connect via cellular).
This is moderately useful to compare the actual average speed provided by your ISP to the maximum speed which your ISP says that you should expect but only if you're the only one using the ISP resources and the server supplying data is fast (also using a high speed connection) with no other demands than yours and there are only a few 'hops' between the server and you.
So for many people and situations this isn't really very useful, it's simply interesting to watch when things seem slow to download, you get to see just how slow. But Networx can't explain the root cause(s): ISP, # of users, server, connection (although cellular is a bit special, you get to see the impact of rain and snow which slows things down quite a bit in some cases). Over time you might determine that downloading from a particular site is always slow and therefore expect it, but you can't change it, so...

Just accept it 'as is', don't let it drive you nuts...

J

Quote

NetPilot

How do you derive the numbers at the bottom next to the letters 'D:' and 'U:'? Are they some average of the last five kbit/s samples of less than one second taken once per second or are they the total number of actual kbits transferred over the last five seconds divided by five??

An average value of the last five samples taken in the last five seconds (one per second). Perfectionists can change this in the hidden settings under Mean samples