CentOS – massive usage on loopback interface

bandwidthcentosloopback

I have a CentOS installation which is running fairly smoothly.

Today I ran ifconfig mainly to see what sort of usage has been coming across the ethernet interface, and to also check my link speed.

This is what I ended up seeing for the loopback device:

lo        Link encap:Local Loopback
          inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1
          RX packets:10301085132061223274 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:13981054163812689233 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
          RX bytes:11783901785008000095 (0.6 EiB)  TX bytes:10333501021200548281 (0.9 EiB)

This just feels completely wrong – almost an EiB of data?

Any assistance in tracking down the source of these statistics would be greatly appreciated.

Best Answer

Does it continually increment?

Take a peek at the data being transferred via:

  • tcpdump -n -i lo

If your screen starts scrolling furiously, hit Control-C and look at the source/destination ports to get an idea of which application is generating the traffic.

If not, save the numbers you see, check again tomorrow, and see how much the counters have incremented by. Rinse and repeat the tcpdump test.

Related Topic