verifying high bandwidth usage server

disproportionately with my traffic

[hamids54]

hi,

I do worry about bandwidth usage of my server.at june I had 5.4 gigs per day.at july I had 9.4 gigs per day.until now I had 52 gigs only for 2 days! it does not proportionates with my traffic .

My website is a medical portal that has a big forum and some articles... there are no files such as video or music for downloading and I have not had any huge files for uploading.

What can i do to control and to economize bandwidth usage of this server.

[lammert]

Bandwidth can be consumed by many protocols. You can first check your web server logs to see if the growth in log file size is comparable with the growth in overall bandwidth.

The second check is to see if some large files are mentioned in your web server log files which may be part of the problem. Also check for entries in your log files which don't seem to belong to your site. A hacker may have gained control over (part) of your site and use it to serve large download files, host a phising site etc.

Then check your email log files. If you have a vulnerability in your email system, a hacker may currently use it to send spam from.

If you can't find the cause of your bandwidth usage yourself, contact your hosting company. They should be able to tell you if the bandwidth usage is incoming or outgoing traffic, and which protocol (http, smtp, etc) is mainly responsible for it.

[AlexK]

If your server is Linux, and you have root access, you can try Munin [munin-monitoring.org], a resource/bandwidth monitoring tool (I have no personal experience of this tool; it is on my to-do list).

[hamids54]

Thank you

very useful information

Server manager believes my backups are the reason for the bandwidth usage.I have local back up for 7 days and off site daily back up on remote server.they said Open ssl was corrupted and caused the issues.they updated all packages.

I am monitoring BW if this problem persists or not and if not I will ask them to check the items you mentioned and the tool AlexK talked about it.

[lammert]

Glad to hear the probably cause of your bandwidth usage has been identified.

You might try the Munin tool anyway. It is a great way to display all kinds of system parameters in graphs. It helps to identify memory usage details, estimate when your disks will be full, show performance parameters of all kind of software like databases, web servers, email software, etc.

[hamids54]

Server manager installed munin.but I don`t know how to interpret it.