Network history: Total recieved counter is wild

[Ketil Vestby]

Binary package hint: gnome-system-monitor

When the network history counts up to ~4 GiB recieved data, it drops down in several small steps - and then climbes up to the limit again. This continues, so according to my harddisk storage the received amount have passed 100 GB. According to the counter, I've recieved less than 400 MB data at this moment..

Am using the latest 8.10 Intrepid, installed yesterday.

apt-cache policy gnome-system-monitor
gnome-system-monitor:
  Installed: 2.24.0-0ubuntu1
  Candidate: 2.24.0-0ubuntu1
  Version table:
 *** 2.24.0-0ubuntu1 0
        500 http://no.archive.ubuntu.com intrepid/main Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

What I expect to happend: A climb of the recieved counter, that dont get 100 GiB below the harddisks counter of change in free space.

What actually happend: When the recieved counter reaches a certain level, it drop down in small steps until it tarts climbing again.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 8.10
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/gnome-system-monitor
Package: gnome-system-monitor 2.24.0-0ubuntu1
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: gnome-system-monitor
Uname: Linux 2.6.27-7-generic i686

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

thanks for the report, could you take an screenshot of the issue?

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

We are closing this bug report because it lacks the information we need to investigate the problem, as described in the previous comments. Please reopen it if you can give us the missing information, and don't hesitate to submit bug reports in the future. To reopen the bug report you can click on the current status, under the Status column, and change the Status back to New. Thanks again!.

[misiu_mp (misiu-mp)]

I would like to confirm something similar.
It looks like 'Total sent' (or received) amount of bytes is kept in a 32bit variable and is wrapped around each 4GB sent.
You will never see total sent larger than 4GB. When the wrap happens you can see the transfer rate graph go to zero for a moment. Caused probably by using the wrapped variable in calculating speed (prev = 4GB, new =0 => speed negative).
Changing the counter to 64bits should be a temporary fix. In the long run some kind of bignum is needed (or decrease resolution and count the amount of kB transmitted, then MB, then GB).
Leaving it as is makes the counter quite useless especially as you can achieve gigabit speeds on networks today.

This is all speculations as I didn't look at the source, but it seems quite clear to me.