How to see which app is using the most network data

Two places in Pulse by Zaweba show you which app is using the most network data. The Live page has a network column for every app, which you can sort so the biggest user comes to the top, and the History page has a Top bandwidth users list that ranks apps over today, yesterday or this week. Between them you can catch the culprit whether it is busy now or was busy earlier.

Windows does keep some records of its own, but they are tucked away and not easy to read alongside everything else a program is doing. Pulse puts the data next to CPU, memory and disk use, so you can see the whole of what an app is up to.

Before you start

You need Pulse installed and running. It runs as a normal user, so there is nothing to set up before the first look. There is one thing worth knowing, though. By default Windows does not let a normal user start the event trace that counts each app's traffic as it happens. Until you give that permission, the network column on the Live page reads "Data today" and shows each app's data use from Windows' own usage records, the same data behind Data usage in Windows Settings. These figures lag about a minute and are grouped coarsely. A note bar above the table always says which mode is active.

If you want figures that move second by second, open Settings, find Live network per app and choose "Allow live per-app network". This adds your Windows account to the Performance Log Users group once. Windows asks for administrator approval, and you sign out and back in afterwards. From then on Pulse counts each app's TCP and UDP traffic live, still without running as administrator.

Finding the heavy user right now

Open the Live page from the View menu or with Ctrl+1. Click the network column heading. Number columns sort biggest first on the first click, so the app using the most data rises to the top. All the processes of one program are gathered into a single row, which matters for browsers and game launchers that run dozens of helpers. You see one total with the program's icon and its proper name, not a list of anonymous entries.

The table updates every second without jumping about, so your sort order holds while you watch. If you are looking for one program in particular, type part of its name into the Find box.

Ranking apps over a day or a week

The live view only tells you about the present. For "what used all that data?" questions, the History page is the better tool. Open it with Ctrl+3, from the View menu or from the tray menu, and choose Today, Yesterday or This week in the Show selector. The Top bandwidth users list ranks apps by network data used over that period.

Pulse stores Windows' hourly per-app data usage records as well as its own minute-by-minute figures, so this list works even if you never turned on live counting. The network graph on the same page shows when the traffic happened, which helps you match a spike to something you were doing, such as an update or a cloud sync.

Keeping it under control

Once you know which app uses the most, you can decide what to do about it. On the Alerts page you can turn on an alert for an app using more than a set number of gigabytes in a day; the default is 5 GB. If an app has no business using that much, select it in the Live table and choose End task, or use Open file location to find out exactly what it is. Pulse by Zaweba keeps all of this on your own PC, with no account and nothing sent anywhere.