Measuring Bandwidth Usage

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Permalink Reply by Ken Mayer on September 11, 2008 at 8:44pm

If you're interested in per-directory traffic for a web application, it sounds like you want an application layer tool like webalizer that creates stats from apache logs. It won't give you a complete bit count, but it will be close, modulo network layer headers. I thought that Wireshark worked at the network layer, so it wouldn't know much about directories or other application layer structure.

Permalink Reply by Truman Leung on September 12, 2008 at 9:25am

Thanks for your reply, Ken. I finally came to that same conclusion about Wireshark after researching it some more. I'm glad that you confirmed it for me.

Permalink Reply by Josh Kuo on September 13, 2008 at 4:27pm

I haven't tried it myself, but I suspect Google Analytic may be configured/hacked to do what you want. I don't know any free web analytic tools that would track bandwidth usage by directory (recursive?)... There are plenty of free apache log analyzers out there, you might be able to embed in your PHP code some kind of bandwidth usage stat and stick it in the apache log, or plot it to MRTG.

You _could_ run Wireshark to look at your traffic, you'd see all the HTTP headers and theoretically you can parse our the directory/file that's being hit/accessed... but Wireshark is meant to be a network sniffer, and this would be too inefficient (and resource intensive) to be practical.

Permalink Reply by Kurt Sussman on September 18, 2008 at 6:29am

You can also use a little script magic on your log file to pull out the date and bytes transferred for the directory in question, then total by day. But a web analytics tool will give you that and more.