How in the Tech

Per Application Network Traffic with NetLimiter

By Adam Myers ⋅ January 21, 2009 ⋅ Tags: Networking

Do you pride yourself in knowing exactly what goes on and comes out of your computer? Windows ships with a firewall that is turned on by default. As you install new software, you may be prompted with approval requests for the Windows Firewall if the software tries to access the Internet. This is great and all but it can quickly become a burden addressing all the issues, to the point that we may just end up turning off the firewall altogether. While I can’t endorse this tactic, I do understand the annoyances – I install new things almost daily and see these types of prompts routinely.

NetLimiter 2, while not a firewall, is a nice application that really reveals what your running applications are doing, at least with respect to network access. Once installed, NetLimiter displays a list of all running processes as well as their current incoming and outgoing network traffic and connection ports. Has your network speed suddenly vanished? With NetLimiter it’s pretty simple to determine what is going on! Keeping an eye on active processes is grand but what really makes NetLimiter stand out is its historical accounting – that is, you can view how much traffic was generated by Firefox yesterday or even last month. Useful? Perhaps. Interesting? Definitely!

NetLimiter is a free download but they also offer a Pro version that offers a few new features – the standout being traffic shaping.