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Recently I found that my computer started generating much more traffic than usually while my usage patterns haven't changed.

I used Net Limiter to monitor traffic and found that huge part of that traffic was from Internet Explorer 8.0.6001.18702 and directed to macromedia.com. It constitutes about one third of all my daily traffic and this bothers me.

Why is this traffic there? How do I get rid of it?

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Can you see the IP address of macromedia.com in the net limiter application? If so do a whois lookup on it to make sure it is registered to macromedia.com. – Arctor Mar 22 '11 at 7:11
@jb48394: Well, actually I don't - all traffic goes through the company firewall and it's a firewall report mentioning macromedia.com. – sharptooth Mar 22 '11 at 7:15
Define huge. If your total traffic is 10MB, then 3MB is not that much (for downloading updates, for example). – Olli Mar 22 '11 at 7:34
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@Olli: It's more like 60 megabytes per day - with that many updates it should be the most reliable software in the world. – sharptooth Mar 22 '11 at 7:39
If there are any adobe toolbars, or add on's in your IE browser, disable them, see if that traffic stops or decreases dramatically. – Moab Mar 22 '11 at 14:40
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2 Answers

up vote 1 down vote accepted

Macromedia was the maker of Flash before Adobe bought them, so that's your likely culprit. Is it possible you have something installed to clear you cache that's forcing you to re-download the latest flash update every time you start a new IE session?

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Turned out I didn't have Flash player installed. So every time IE saw Flash content it would go to macromedia.com, download the player and show "do you want to install it?" over the Flash content area. Since I didn't click anything there it would redownload the player when I reopened the page. That's a completely insane deficieny in IE and deserves a major rant including word HATRED many times and possibly breaking something. The solution was to install the player and then disable since I don't want Flash content to be displayed. – sharptooth Apr 13 '11 at 5:04
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up vote 2 down vote

  1. Check your add-ons, divide and conquer to see if an odd add-on isn't causing the traffic problem.

  2. Check your usage pattern, are you using something related to Macromedia? A Flash app/game?

  3. If that doesn't help... Identify the culprit by firing up Process Monitor.

    1. Set it to only log network traffic...

      enter image description here

    2. Make sure we drop filtered events... Filter > Drop Filtered Events.

    3. Let's filter on Macromedia... Filter > Filter > Path Contains macromedia then Include > Add.

      enter image description here

    4. Continue your daily tasks and come back to Process Monitor every now and then.

      If you have a second monitor or can afford running side-by-side it's even easier to see it directly...

    5. Now you have the PID of the offender, also right click the event and check out the properties.

    6. Check the DLLs mentioned for anything non-Microsoft.

    7. Use Task Manager or Process Explorer and close tabs till the PID process is closed.

      This can allow you to see what tab and thus what website was doing these requests.

  4. If that doesn't help you can get your hands dirty and check what data is transferred with Wireshark.

I hope this serves as a good base to troubleshoot your problem, good luck!

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