Sending large amounts of data spontaneously

Question

In my normal experience with the internet connection, the bits of data sent is about 50 to 80% of that received, but occasionally Firefox starts transmitting large amounts of data spontaneously; what it is, I don't know and where it's going to, I don't know. For example, today the AT&T status screen showed about 19 MB received and about 10 MB sent after about an hour of on-line time. A few minutes later, I looked down at the status screen and it showed 19.5 MB received and 133.9 MB sent, and the number was steadily increasing. Just before I went on line today, I ran a complete scan of the computer with McAfee and it reported nothing needing attention. I ran the scan because a similar effusion of sending data spontaneously had happened yesterday. When I noticed the data pouring out today, I closed Firefox and it stopped. When I opened Firefox right afterward, the transmission of data from did not recommence. My first thought was that my computer had been captured by the bad guys and now I was a robot, but McAfee says not to worry. But should I worry anyway? What's going on, or that not having a good answer now, how can I find out what's going on? And how can I make it stop, unless I'm seeing some kind of maintenance operation that Mozilla or Microsoft is subjecting me to?

Answer 1

Instead of using URLConnection open a Socket to the server port (80 probably) send a POST http request followed by the data, you may then (optional) recieve data from the server to check that the servlet is ok, this is the same protocol as URLConnection, but you have control over when the data is actually sent...
Socket sock=new Socket(getHost(),80);
DataOutputStream dos=new DataOutputStream(sock.getOutputStream());
dos.writeBytes("POST servletname\r\n");
dos.writeBytes("Content-type: text/plain\r\n");  //optional, but good if you know
dos.writeBytes("Content-length: "+lengthOfData+"\r\n")  //again, optional, but good if you can know it without caching the data first
dos.writeBytes("\r\n");   // gotta have a blank line before the data
  // send data now
DataInputStream=new DataInputStream(sock.getInputStream());  //optional if you want to recieve
  // recieve any feedback from servlet if you want
dis.close();
dos.close();
sock.close();im guessing that URLConnection caches the data so it can fill in "Content-length"