How to measure the network bandwidth used between client and server?
ios, network-programming, networking, php
Solution
I would recommend using Charles Proxy. It is an invaluable tool for debugging all kinds of information exchanged via HTTP. You may use it for tracing all HTTP/s communication from and to your iPhone/iPod/iPad as well as the simulator.
It does unfortunately not work too well with most Android devices as those do not really support configuring a system-wide HTTP proxy. For those cases and non HTTP-based communication, I would recommend using WireShark.
In some rare cases, for reasons that are still unclear to me, Charles rarely fails on iOS devices for HTTP-based connections - a typical case would be GoogleAnalytics. For those, again I would recommend WireShark.
Problem
I have a client which GETs a JSON response from a server. I want to calculate how many requests/responses will consume my allotted transfer allowance from a web hosting company (e.g. 100GB per month). How do I measure/calculate this? I assume I only need to measure once because the msgs are of a consistent length and format. I have control over client/server/network. All can be uniquely dedicated to the task. The client is an IOS App and the server is a PHP REST Web Service (on Windows). Both on my LAN. I know nothing about this and so far have just got the size of the JSON using `strlen()`. Is that even heading in the right direction?