I have a 2018 MacBook Pro i7 running MacOS Catalina 10.15.3. I'm uploading a 4.88 GB video to YouTube, using the YouTube Studio web interface in Google Chrome 79. My MacBook Pro is connected to my 5 Ghz SSID on my TP-Link EAP245 (Generation 1) access point, which is connected via gigabit ethernet to my Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X, which connects to my Netgear CM1000 cable modem. I don't have any VLANs or special routing rules configured.
According to the Network tab of Activity Monitor, I'm uploading data at roughly 10 megabytes per second (MB/sec). However, my Internet service is only supposed to support 35 megabits per second (Mb/sec), which comes out to about 3.5 megabytes per second.
I'm reasonably confident that there is no other major data transfer occurring in parallel with my YouTube video upload.
I can use the Python-based glances
utility to observe that only a single network interface (my en0
Wi-Fi adapter) is pushing out approximately ~80 Mb/sec, which roughly matches the 10 MB/sec. that I'm seeing in Activity Monitor. When I'm not uploading a video, the idle utilization of the en0
network interface is only a few KB/sec.
My MacBook's en0
network interface is using the default MTU of 1500, according to ifconfig
. All my other network devices use the default MTU.
In addition, according to my router's traffic monitor, I'm actually pushing out 44 Mbps (35 Mbps slightly over-provisioned).
Question: How can I explain the discrepancy between a 3.5 MB/sec. Internet service, versus the ~10 MB/sec being indicated by Activity Monitor in MacOS?