Reducing data usage

[smagness]

I’m investigating reducing the data usage of our device. Using wireshark/tcpdump I have been able to establish that remote.it is ‘pinging’ over UDP quite frequently (presumably to maintain a valid connected/disconnected state on the remote.it servers).

Are there any settings to reduce the frequency of these, or any other ways to reduce the amount of data remote.it is consuming?

[mycal]

what kind of bandwidth are you seeing? You have seen this right?

Bandwidth Utilization

Currently a device with 1 service (IE ssh) and bulk scripting will use the following amount of bandwidth when idle: .02 Mbyte per hr, .49 Mbyte per day, 14 Mbyte per month Each extra service you add to a device will consume an extra: .01 Mbyte per hr, .24 Mbyte per day, 7 Mbyte per month. An idle connected service (P2P or proxy) will use the following amount of data: .065 Mbyte per hr. This is not including Data transferred over the connection. Cellular connected devices may not want to l…

From what we see this is much less than most keepalive’s we have seen.

There are ways you can reduce this, but likely the biggest data usage is when you have a proxy connected, where the bandwidth goes up quite a bit.

have you tried Desktop for connections? This might help a lot.

Let me know how many services your device has and what your seeing for bandwidth.

[smagness]

Thanks, I hadn’t seen that post. That looks fairly similar to what I’m seeing. We have a device that registers as bulk and ssh. Our tcpdump calculations with extrapolation came out at ~20Mb a month, definitely higher than your measurement, but not far off. Also worth mentioning we are using a cellular modem.

What do you mean by ‘Desktop for connections’?

Update:
Sorry, are you saying that using the Remote.it Desktop App (https://docs.remote.it/guides/using-the-desktop-app) will improve bandwidth requirements when we want to connect over ssh? This won’t affect the baseline 20Mb/month keepalive though, obviously.

[mycal]

Yes I think most bandwidth people consume is when they have a connection, as the keepalive for an established connection is much higher than the heartbeat to the servers.

So you might have a proxy running for a while after its use, which eats up much more bandwidth.

You can add settings in the provisioning file to reduce the server bandwidth, but you would have to calculate the max time your NAT/firewall tables stay open and set it as aggressive as you think you can without loosing reach-ability .

the connectd -nat

may tell you how aggressive you can go, I’ll see if those instructions are available and see if they are not already online to post a guide.