How can I see which device is hammering my home internet?

[d000hg]

I am suffering from what I think is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bufferbloat, where a device on my home network is saturating the uplink so badly that everything becomes unresponsive.

I previously found one culprit by luck on an access-point which would show traffic throughput - I could corroborate every instance with high upload - and applied a throttle which massively improved things.
However at least one other device is less frequently causing the same problem which typically manifests as hugely increased latency, making RDP sessions most frustrating.

We've seen it is typically caused by badly-behaving Google Drive/etc clients doing background upload sync but how can I see which device it is when the problem is spotted in real-time and nobody is actively using their device?
My router has very limited facilities for measuring such things, my Bt mesh discs will let me temporarily pause any device's WiFi which means trial and error is so far my only option.

All I want is something that will give me a list of active devices on my network and how much data they are sending (and receiving?) because that's almost certainly the issue - a device is maxing out my 5Mbps upload speed.

Or should I just buy a router with AQM/SQM?

[malvolio]

Got a networked printer? They generate a lot of noise polling everything else looking for work...

That said, I've been looking for such a thing for ages and never found anything that wasn't enterprise-size and needed expertise to set it up (and interpret it!), so I'll follow this thread with interest

[northernladuk]

That's not actually measured in Upload or downloaded data is it? I'm working on my BT hub as we speak and it's possible to list all the connections by the amount of data uploaded or download but that's not the same as over buffering is it? So nothing I can see on the BT hub will help.

[GregRickshaw]

Just go upstairs and see if the kids are on the XBox

[WTFH]

There was a story on here the other day about OnlyFans. #JustSaying.

More seriously... what about mobile phones?
I know that Apple devices only like to do backups when they are charging, could it be something like that?

[Protagoras]

The easy answer is a router that allows monitoring of bandwidth use.
Example router reports rates per device every 10s.


If you're lucky, you may find something similar on your router??

Some routers also allow restrictions to be placed on device bandwidth, so that for example, when an office NAS does a cloud data synch this doesn't saturate the WAN uplink.

As malvolio says, other solutions are likely to need expertise to setup, and some may require specific features of network switches, for example.

I did come across this, but have not tried it. https://www.technicallywizardry.com/...twork-monitor/

If the device causing the problems is wireless, maybe you have an Access Point that offers some level of monitoring information.

[d000hg]

The likelihood is it is a mobile phone - some apps throttle but others seem not to - so one low-tech option is to wait until it happens and block them on the WiFi, I know from experience that if I can block the offender my performance will instantly skyrocket.
However because we run a business here it's not as simple as "it's my phone or hers". Hence the desire to analytically see which device is to blame instead of guess.

My router is just the PlusNet hub which will show me up/down usage by device (same as the BT one I think) but that's total, not rate of use and that's what I need: which devices are active now.

If I get a better router which allows monitoring this properly, I might as well just get a better router which has tools built in to avoid the issue https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/