Just wondering if I can somehow track if all that data was used by a particular add-on or tab or what.
Historically I've been using about .5gb every month, I haven't done anything different today but here we are. What can I do to find out what happened and prevent the same scenario?
I’m curious why you think it was Firefox. In any situation, US based mobile networks, on a practical scale, top out around 140M per second in very robust, and not highly deployed environments. Usually those will be highlighted as 5G Ultra Wideband (Verizon’s term i think) or something. Even in the best environment, that’s still more than 1.5 hours of maximum data usage. You would be throttled back way before this point, so you’re not looking at something you did suddenly. It’s likely weeks of effort.
Are you watching a lot of YouTube, TikTok, porn, or some other video service in your browser lately? If not, then it’s not likely you’re browser. If you are, I’d recommend getting the app specific to the service you’re using. They can sometimes leverage non- standard codecs to reduce bandwidth usage while streaming. Also turn off autoplay on videos during your doom scrolls.
Android's app data usage is what tells me it was Firefox.
I probably overstated things with the word suddenly, but it was over the one day. And since I am on WiFi at home and at work, and it probably happened in one block of time (as WiFi data usage does not show a spike) I would have to conclude it happened within a 2 to 2.5-hour window. You do make a good point about the max rate, I've no clue what it is out there. I'll have to check if it can even possibly fit.
I was browsing over a solid half of that time, but no videos just furniture stores and some forum. And the battery did in fact drain quite fast even though I didn't think much of it on the moment. I was not throttled but just lost data access once my allowance was used up, because that's how it works on my pay as you go plan, I'm based in the UK. Of course it had to happen on day 1 of my monthly 🙃
If this was on your mobile you can go into settings>data usage and it’ll tell you what apps have used what data recently. Once found ensure you restrict its data usage also in settings to prevent reoccurrence.
Think it depends what phone you have, on my pixel I can select to disable background data usage in individual apps, which will prevent it doing anything on it’s own in the background I’m not aware of
Probably some tab. Buggy javascript sometimes goes into infinite loops, including DDoSing its own website with 0-timeout requests, and no way to immediately tell other than the phone getting warm. You probably can’t see it now that the tab is closed, and I’m not sure if the mobile firefox has access to these features, but on desktop you can see open sockets with sent/received bytes in about:networking, and per-tab/per-addon cpu usage in about:performance, and set up logging for next time. But otherwise there isn’t a convenient chart with per-website data usage hidden somewhere.
Thanks a lot, I did not know about either. But yeah, short of having had logging set up ahead of time, it doesn't seem like I can get much more on the incident unfortunately.
Some more granularity in Android's data usage warnings, with maybe some sanity check presets (like a single app using up over 1gb in the same day or something) would be an easy and relatively painless way to avoid these, but I don't think there's anything more than the xgb over 30-day periods thing unfortunately.
Oh well. Hopefully it was a fluke. Day 1 of my monthly data allowance this happens, and my carrier are absolute dicks with their pricing for additional data. Ducks to be me
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