We recently had some slowdowns on the wireless portion of our office network. We looked around and determine that (ahem) both an iMac down the hall and my MacBook Pro are generating the bulk of it. Since this is a predominantly Windows network and I love Macs, I was tasked with finding out what was going on.
I started out by looking at my own machine. The first think I wanted to know was what traffic was coming and going and by whom. That is, what programs/daemons were generating the packets of information. After looking over my Utilities folder, I was left wondering, “Well, how do figure this out?”. I searched the Internet and came across ProteMac Meter. While this is a commercial program, thankfully, it has a thirty (30) day trial.
So, I downloaded and fired it up.
Nothing.
This got me thinking, what could possible be generating this traffic. Next stop, my networking settings.
I noticed that I had AppleTalk running. Since it is not needed by the services I a running, I turned it off. That seemed to work for my computer’s traffic. I still had to deal with the iMac down the hall.
I looked over the network setting first. Nothing. No problem, install ProteMac.
Bingo!
I found something called LaunchCFMApp running. Until this point, I had never heard of it. After some quick Googling, I was made aware that this is something used to run Cocoa applications on OS X. Now, all I had to figure out was what is a seemingly OS 9 program doing on a current OS X machine that does not have Classic installed? Answer – it was MS Entourage from Office 2004. So, I told the user, try using either Apple Mail or upgrade to Office 2008. She did both.
After installing Office 2008, she went back to using Entourage. Now, I am thinking this will be fine because Microsoft has had some time to translate this out of Cocoa. Well, our little network problem and LaunchCFMApp came back.
She is now using Apple Mail permanently.
While I have never seen this kind of traffic problem before, it was nonetheless reproducible and instantaneous. Somehow, Entourage is generating a lot of traffic on our network.
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This is the last night for the DUG Conference 2008. As usual, the last night is the Be True To Your School party. 
The DUG is now open. The conference is truly busy and the first meetings were this morning @ 7AM. I was early. That means I had less sleep that I even counted on. No complaints so far, but I wish I have taken that last few minutes of my snooze.