Why is my old-ish HP printer using the most data on my network?!

GhostRoadieBL · January 27

first image is the past week's worth of network traffic. second is today's alone.

It's multiple times more traffic than the rest of my network combined.

The amount of uploading is the biggest concern since I only print a few times a month, there should be no or next to no traffic on this device.

after seeing this, I've gone ahead and blocked all traffic to it through my router so it's currently LAN only and I'll be checking in on it in another week to see if the upload is still this high.

Even the down traffic is excessive compared to the single (few kb) file I sent to it this week. It is on wifi but WTF HP?

A hundred gigs a week is obscene.

anyone have ideas on what this could be? I'm thinking it's calling home and updating the status thousands of times a day or is live telemetry of what the printer is doing but that would only be confirmed if the data throughput goes down now that I've blocked it from outside services.

Very confusing how a printer uses more data than streaming videos most days.

--------------------NEW UPDATE!------------------------------------------------------------

blocking the printer from outside traffic did nothing to change the network traffic to and from the printer. This at least confirms the transfers were internal LAN traffic and not dumping data outside to the web. Removing HP software from all the computers did nothing to the traffic either. Now it's just a USB printer on a share and the traffic is fully cleaned up.

Best guess is whenever the printer was on wifi, it would constantly status call each system on the network over and over thousands of times per cycle even when nothing was being printed and the systems were responding to the pings or status calls giving the printer a combined higher traffic than the individual systems.

Very dumb rabbit hole to go down for the sake of reducing unnecessary network traffic. HP should really fix their old drivers to only status call once per minute or only when an outgoing data stream from a computer is sent, since there's spool up time anyway when the printer is idle, noone will notice a 30sec delay in a print job transfer anyway.

LIGISTX · January 27

47 minutes ago, GhostRoadieBL said:

first image is the past week's worth of network traffic. second is today's alone.

It's multiple times more traffic than the rest of my network combined.

The amount of uploading is the biggest concern since I only print a few times a month, there should be no or next to no traffic on this device.

after seeing this, I've gone ahead and blocked all traffic to it through my router so it's currently LAN only and I'll be checking in on it in another week to see if the upload is still this high.

Even the down traffic is excessive compared to the single (few kb) file I sent to it this week. It is on wifi but WTF HP?

A hundred gigs a week is obscene.

anyone have ideas on what this could be? I'm thinking it's calling home and updating the status thousands of times a day or is live telemetry of what the printer is doing but that would only be confirmed if the data throughput goes down now that I've blocked it from outside services.

Very confusing how a printer uses more data than streaming videos most days.

I’d say the only 2 options is the printer is somehow being used to exfiltrate data from your network, or your UniFi control panel is confused and reporting info incorrectly. It’s definitely not phoning home and using that much bandwidth doing so, that would be on the order of KB per month… maybe single digit MB per month.

GhostRoadieBL · January 28

7 hours ago, LIGISTX said:

I’d say the only 2 options is the printer is somehow being used to exfiltrate data from your network, or your UniFi control panel is confused and reporting info incorrectly. It’s definitely not phoning home and using that much bandwidth doing so, that would be on the order of KB per month… maybe single digit MB per month.

That's what I was thinking too, I was able to find another post on HP forums about the printer and pc pinging each other thousands of times a second when on wifi to imitate a usb connection (very janky way to do status checks)

The solution was them uninstalling the HP software from the computers on the network since it was the cause of the non-stop status messaging.

That's my next step if the usage hasn't changed tomorrow.

Alex Atkin UK · January 29

On 1/28/2024 at 6:38 AM, GhostRoadieBL said:

That's what I was thinking too, I was able to find another post on HP forums about the printer and pc pinging each other thousands of times a second when on wifi to imitate a usb connection (very janky way to do status checks)

The solution was them uninstalling the HP software from the computers on the network since it was the cause of the non-stop status messaging.

That's my next step if the usage hasn't changed tomorrow.

I'd be more interested in what traffic its showing in general while idling, are you leaving it on 24/7? Printers tend to broadcast several different uPNP services so will send out constant traffic over the network. You may be able to turn those off in the WebUI (assuming it has one) but if you turn them all off Windows won't auto-detect the printer, you'd have to add it via IP address manually. Though you can turn off all the ones for the OS you don't use.

I'm not really sure how much traffic that works out to, but that's probably purely LAN traffic unless you enabled web services on the printer. I do know their calling home can be janky though, last year for a while my printer kept rebooting until I blocked it from the Internet. Guessing their web services were broken and the printer was failing to do sanity checking on the responses so just rebooted.