By chance I saw network activity when I didn’t expect any (my wife asked if I was up/downloading anything as her streaming was choppy) so I checked my Mac’s network in ActivityViewer. I found that atMonitor has send 7.5 GIGABYTE and received 3.5 GIGABYTE since the last restart.
WHAT?
Even my dropbox (which I use a LOT) only managed 80 MB since my last restart.
Anyone has any idea what is going on?
In any case: if you are using it you might want to keep an eye on it.
Seriously, this app hasn’t been updated in almost two years and its web page has been removed. When the final release of this software came out, Mountain Lion had just been released. Alarm bells should be ringing. Just remove it.
I used this app a long time ago and stopped using it because it is no longer in development. Doesn’t work with the latest MBP.
Cannot remember it has such a high online traffic though. Maybe you can send the devs a mail about this?
atMonitor has two processes that run. One is the primary app that you see on the screen and the other is a helper app. Both listen on the local address 127.0.0.1. I noticed this behavior years ago and decided to track down what was going on using little snitch and other tools to monitor specific network traffic per app and what ip/network interface it was talking to. The only time they talk to the internet is when you first launch atMonitor. This happens if you have “check for updates” enabled in the app preferences. If you don’t, it never tries to talk to the internet. Mean while all monitoring information is passed to and from the helper app from the main app over the local machine interface. Over time the information passed between the two grows to be quite large. This is just how it is designed to function with no impact on security/privacy. No information leaves your computer.