How to tell what is updating?

On occasion my Internet connection will seem to lock up with very long load times per page. At those times, I know that it is some piece of software that some programmer thinks that should be refreshed without bothering to ask the user. My connection isn't very high speed so it doesn't take much to eat up the download bandwidth.

When that happens, I can see a solid incoming stream in the network scope of the Activity Monitor. I know it has to be some piece of software doing an auto update, despite my always turning off that option in the rare instances that I install some app. And it isn't OSX itself - that is definitely set to manual update.

Is there a way, in OSX, to tell which program is updating? Or do I have to crank up some long forgotten (by me) Unix utility like Netstat to run it down?

Little snitch comes with a decent network monitor. it tells you what is connecting to what: so if software update is running, which usually sucks up a bit of bandwidth, it will tell/show you.

Thanks. Downloaded the demo and am trying it. Seems to be a fairly neat app. It certainly tells you what is touching your Mac at the moment.

cool, you can also set up things to consistently block, and things to always allow. gives you a bit more control.

i think the best part is the menubar network activity monitor. you can select it in preferences.

Wow. Little Snitch is an eye opening app. I haven't fooled around with 'Net programming since the much simpler '90s. Back then, you connected with a site and that is what you got, plus maybe a picture link or two.

Now, I click on what I assume to be a fairly straight forward web page and see that a huge amount of the incoming stream is from third parties. Ad servers, click logging hosts, and bunches of places that I can't even figure out what they are.

And now I see why some hosts are slow at times. I always assumed that the reason was bandwidth saturation by my ISP. But if any one of the dozen links that a page calls up is slow, or offline, the loading stops at that point. It is very easy to see with LS.

By the way. My original problem was Adobe trying to do an unrequested update. Didn't even realize I had Adobe on here. Which I don't, anymore.

Thanks much robduckyworth.

yep, it is amazing to see how much you are connectly with the internet silently, and the volume of data being transferred. glad i could help you