Google Voice & Video - Network Activity

The Windows Resource Monitor provides expanded details of CPU, memory, disk and network activity. A link to the Resource Monitor appears on the bottom of the Windows 7, 8 and 10 Performance tab of the Task Manager. This older article describes briefly the features and displays of the first 4 tabs of the Resource Monitor.

During this morning's conversation on 3740 kHz I joined a Google Hangouts session with W4BXI and explored the Resource Monitor a bit more than I had previously. I looked at the Network Activity tab to see the usage of the Google Talk plug-in that provides voice and video for Google Hangouts. Below are 3 partial screen shots showing the levels of network activity for both voice and video.

This first view shows network activity with a table of processes on the left. (Click on the image for a larger view.) Separate columns show send, receive and total Bytes/sec. For the voice activity in progress you see the average receive rate of 6,856 Bytes/sec. By clicking the check box to the left of googletalkplugin.exe its activity is highlighted in orange on the graph to the right. The receive activity corresponds to 8 x 6,856 = 54,848 bits/sec or 54.848 kb/s, which is very low on the 1 Mb/sec full scale graph.

This view shows the greatly increased average send rate of 61,170 Bytes/sec when I started sending live webcam video. The average rate corresponds to 489,360 bits/sec or almost 1/2 Mb/s. The graph on the right shows the variation in data rate as I was moving the camera around.

This view shows the data rate dropping on the graph when I stopped sending video. Due to the averaging time for the data on the left side, the send rate had not yet settled back to its voice-only rate.



I hope you will think of the Resource Monitor program the next time you are wondering about what is going on in your Windows computer.

- John