Excessive Network traffic for Kovan TestNet

[Mitchell-Grimes]

• OpenEthereum version: 3.0.1
• Operating system: Linux Ubuntu 18.4
• Installation: built from source
• Fully synchronized: yes
• Network: ethereum / kovan
• Restarted: no

Here's a comparison over the past month for 2 networks. Kovan Testnet in blue and Ethereum in green. Kovan is roughly 6.4 MB/s vs Ethereum's 334 Kb/s.

Configuration is the same for both nodes:

	--identity="{{ ethereum_identity }}" \
	--base-path={{ ethereum_home_path }} \
	--chain={{ ethereum_chain }} \
	--warp-barrier={{ ethereum_warp_block }}\
	--mode=active\
	--no-periodic-snapshot \
	--fat-db="off" \
	--ws-origins="*" \
	--ws-apis=eth \
	--pruning=fast

From the start, even when connecting to the Kovan network, I see that peer counts are relatively low. So for some suggestions in related tickets, adjusting the peer count doesn't seem to completely solve the issue as it does have some affect.

Related issues:

• #4007
• Duplicate of #2831, see also #1596 and #2053

Is there any potential issues with my configuration that stands out? Please let me know.

[rakita]

There is no configuration that will do bandwidth throttling and as you can read it in the linked issue, adding it is not a priority and it is a high risk cause it is a very sensitive part of code.

[Mitchell-Grimes]

So is there any documentation or answer as to what the increase in outbound traffic is caused by? At this point I'm more curious about the difference in behavior specific to Kovan.