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After a fresh boot and login (Ubuntu 18.04), I left the computer on like this for about 30 minutes. When I came back, I saw on the LTE router display. that some process downloaded almost 1 GiB in that time.

I confirmed it with vnstat, but I didn't menage to find out what process has used this data.

I can't think of any application that I have, that would do this.

My questions are:

  1. Can it be an innocent operating system process?
  2. Is it possible to discover retroactively what process downloaded so much data? (I have only vnstat installed).
Greenonline
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raban
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    Does `/var/log/apt/history.log` or the output of `snap changes` show anything that could be from that time interval? – muru Jul 30 '21 at 06:24
  • maybe snap is up to something again – qwr Jul 30 '21 at 06:34
  • history.log and snap changes of the time, are empty – raban Jul 30 '21 at 06:46
  • If it's a fresh installed system it could be cloud-init downloading updates. For one turned off for a while, it could be unattended-upgrades. And snaps as mentioned earlier. But it's hard to know without further details. 1. Yes, it can. 2. Check /var/log/apt/history.log and /var/log/syslog – dienteperro Jul 30 '21 at 06:52

1 Answers1

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nethogs enabled me to see data consumption by process name. with nethogs installed, I waited for another event of "mysterious data consumption". and found out it was freshclam process, belongs to ClamAV.

see this question:Freshclam is Using Lots of Mobile Data

Tejas Lotlikar
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raban
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