How to stop linux from consuming bandwidth?

Question

I use fedora 14, and when I start system monitor, i can see that it already downloaded 40 Mb, without doing anything. How can i stop programs that secretly consume my bandwith? I use a prepaid modem with limited bandwith (500 Mb). I guess yum is consuming some bandwith with updates checking and downloading the xmls

Answer 1

Try to investigate what's happening with nethogs.

Also there are tcpdump, wireshark, iotop.

Answer 2

If you determine that yum is the culprit, you may want to raise the value of metadata_expire in /etc/yum.conf. This is the TTL for the yum metadata. Raising it should cause yum to fetch less frequently.

Installing yum-presto will use delta RPMs for updates (this may be the default now?), which will be smaller than the standard RPMs.

You may want to run /usr/bin/gpk-prefs and turn down the frequency of checking for updates from daily to weekly.