How to determine bandwidth used by cron job?

Question

I'm not a unix guy. CPanel does a good job of managing cronjobs and that is what I used to run dozens of cronjobs. All of them combined run more than 5000 times every day. Every cron makes a call to an external API.

How can I check how much bandwidth are all the cron jobs eating? For my website I use awstats and that shows bandwidth usage et al.

Another thing is that I dont want the admins to ban the cron jobs because they are using too much bandwidth (and CPU), more than what is allocated in my web hosting package.

Answer 1

You may want to look at the bandwidth used for individual API calls.

At least I am not aware of a utility that can do b/w analysis at process/thread level. It's at network layer.

Answer 2

You can do all kinds of crazy things with netcat. See http://pauldotcom.com/wiki/index.php/Episode195#Instrumented_Relays for some examples. Combine with tee and wc to count actual bytes passed.