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My Firefox is hogging up way too much of my bandwidth but I can't seem to figure out what is consuming all that data. I have only 2-3 active tabs, the rest 50 tabs from previous reboot are on sleep.

I do have vnstat and conky installed but those were not very helpful in tracking which tab was consuming all that data. for eg enter image description here here you can see that googleusercontent and amazonaws are getting used by two of the processes but the 3 tabs that I had open were nytimes, Bing and AskUbuntu.
So it's quite confusing.

Firefox's Network Monitor tool is also useless as it doesn't track all the tabs but only tracks tabs for which you open it. :( Is there a way I can make it track all the tabs using a shell script or something?

I tried finding some add-on or tool that could track per tab bandwidth usage but without any luck, so I was wondering if there is any way I could do that? Also, I am wondering if there is a way to put all the tabs not used in the past 30 minutes to sleep?

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  • So I think rather than per tab you actually want to have statistics by origin. Dunno whether there’s any solution for that though. I think it’s technically possible though. It has to be a browser extension though, that much is certain.
    – Daniel B
    Nov 4, 2020 at 14:07
  • well, either way should be fine. :) got any suggestions? :) and regarding putting tabs to sleep, I have already used sleep mode addon, it's messes up with my treestyletab addon and makes firefox almost unusable. so it's useless.
    – Nick
    Nov 5, 2020 at 1:50

3 Answers 3

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Had the same problem and found a solution:

Find IP with increasing data usage in about:networking#sockets. Then find corresponding active tab by URL in about:networking. (Filter by column "active" and use ping or something to look up the IP address.)

It was an old tab with a live webcam...

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I am not aware of a tool that would do exactly what you describe. However, I would track Firefox network activity as follows :

  • Go to Tools > Web Developer > Browser Console. At top right, unselect all elements but XHR and Requests. This will allow you to see all requests transiting by Firefox, may they come from any tab or add-on. Checking a request, you can find what amount of data was transferred in Headers tab, and who is the certificate owner in Security tab.

  • Open a new tab and enter "about:performance" in URL field. This will display the Firefox task manager. It does not help you with bandwidth, but display memory and energy impact used by each tab / add-on. This gives already some good ideas of what is heavy and thus probably needs bandwidth to be fetched. It also allows seeing "subframes" for all tabs, which is useful for identifying the request whose certificate owner is unknown to you.

I hope this can help you to identify what is eating your resources, even if it's very manual...

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You can go to about:networking sockets and check the "refresh every 3 seconds" checkbox. Then you'd have to manually figure out which tab the offending sockets belong to, possibly using the Network developer tool. Not easy.

Inspired by https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/6dt511/monitor_network_usage_across_tabs/

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