I have not experienced any problems with the MC usage meter, apart from receiving 'you are near the limit' warnings a day after the billing reset. But others were experiencing discrepancies, so I thought I would take a closer look.
The usage page only displays total bandwidth usage for the current month, as well as the previous three for comparison. But the page source also contains the download and upload values separately.
So I wrote a quick script to sample the data periodically, and graph it over time. I like graphs.
The script samples the data usage every 5 minutes. It appears the MC updates in near real time. I have noticed no delay between usage and the recorded change. (monthly bandwidth consumed by the script is less than .05% of my cap)
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Here you can see my download usage in green and upload in red. (that little sliver at the bottom)
We are currently mid-month for my pay period, so you see half of last month, and half of this month, with the reset in the middle. The stair-step is generated based on a linear 8GB/day usage time the number of days into the current billing cycle.
(8GB/day * 31 day month will give me my 250GB/month cap)
Since February is a short month, the stair step started with a 4 day head start. As long as I keep the usage under the stair-step, I will never exceed my cap.
IMHO, THIS is the kind of data that MC needs to display.
Historically my local router reads slightly higher than MC's system.
This month so far... 90.39 vs 79.90 (12% lower reading)
Last month... 246.44 vs 221.3 (10% lower reading)
I thought this was possibly due to rounding errors caused by the round-robin database that my monitor script uses, but they are similar to differences seen by others.
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