High data usage in Windows 10 overview

4 posts · Closed

Mick Guest
25 May 2017

Hi,

I use (the awesome) NetScan regularly :)
On average, I'd scan a range of ~150 addresses continuously (via Live Display) and might run another 10 one-off scans of ~10 addresses throughout the week.

I was surprised to see NetScan has amassed over 25GB of data usage in the Windows 10 30-day data usage overview, far outstripping the rest of my apps combined.

Does this seem right to you?

Andrew SoftPerfect
25 May 2017

I guess if you scan 150 addresses continuously (for how long?) there will be a lot of data sent back and forth. Especially with many scanning options enabled.

A single scan round shouldn't cause too much traffic though, unless you do things like scanning all ports 0-65535 on each device.

Mick Guest
26 May 2017

Thanks Andrew.

I kick off my 150 address range scan on a Monday morning, then kill it Friday evening each week. Over the week, it only ever finds ~70hosts.
I mainly use default scanning options, but I have added ~10 columns made up of mainly WMI queries and a few regkey reads.
I only port scan 80 and 21.

It's not a big concern obviously, I was mainly just curious.

Andrew SoftPerfect
26 May 2017

Well that's rather expected I guess. It would need to send at least three ARP packets and one or more ICMP packets to see if a device is there. If you are using version 7.0.7 or above, it would be done in a few threads simultaneously, sending tens of packets per second.

This can be reduced by lowering the maximum number of threads in the settings. The background scan uses 1/10 of the maximum number, so if you set it to 10, then the background scan will be effectively single-threaded, taking longer to complete every round and thus using less data.

This topic is closed. It has had no new posts for over a year, so the software versions it talks about may be out of date. Start a new topic in Network Scanner if you have a similar question.