Answers to the things people ask most about Netvane, the network throughput monitor for the macOS menu bar.
Netvane has no Dock icon by design — it lives in the menu bar. Look along the top of your screen for a pair of figures with a down and an up arrow, and click them to open the panel.
If your connection is completely idle, the figures drop out and leave a small greyed ↓↑ in their place. That is still clickable. If the menu bar is crowded, macOS may have hidden the item entirely — quitting another menu bar app makes room.
By default, how fast data is arriving and how fast it is leaving, averaged over the last few seconds. Click the item and the panel shows the same two figures larger, a graph of the last couple of minutes, and the fastest, slowest and total for each direction since Netvane started.
That is deliberate, and it means nothing is moving. A direction has to be quiet continuously for eight seconds before it drops out, and any traffic at all brings it straight back — so on a busy machine it simply stays put.
If you would rather it never moved, turn off Settings → Display → Hide a direction while it is idle.
Because you are on the stacked layout, which puts one figure above the other. Each row costs height the menu bar does not have, and a third would run off the top of the screen. Switch to Settings → Display → Layout → Side by side and you can choose four.
The count beside Show in the menu bar tells you where you are. All eight figures are always in the panel regardless of what is pinned.
Yes — Settings → Units. Bits or bytes, and decimal (steps of 1000) or binary (steps of 1024), which gives you Mb/s, MB/s, Mib/s or MiB/s. Internet connections are normally sold in bits, and file sizes are normally counted in bytes, which is why a 100 Mb/s line downloads at about 12 MB/s.
With Digits → Monospaced, Netvane reserves the width of the widest number it can print, so the readout should hold still. If it still moves, pin the scale: Settings → Units → Scale → Always mega stops the unit switching between kb/s and Mb/s as the speed crosses a threshold.
Download, upload, latency and jitter, over about fifteen seconds. It runs four parallel streams in each direction against Cloudflare's free public endpoint, and discards the first second and a half while the connection gets up to speed — counting that would understate a fast line badly.
No account and no sign-up. Nothing is recorded or sent anywhere; the result is shown and then forgotten.
They measure different things. The menu bar shows what your Mac happens to be moving right now, which is usually far below what the line could do. The speed test deliberately saturates the connection to find the ceiling.
Different tests use different servers, different numbers of connections and different durations, so they rarely agree exactly. Netvane is measuring your last mile to a nearby Cloudflare edge. Treat the trend as more meaningful than the absolute figure.
The endpoint is occasionally busy, and some corporate or school networks block it. Wait a moment and try again. Everything else in Netvane keeps working — the menu bar readout does not use the network at all.
Whichever one currently holds the default route — Wi-Fi, Ethernet, a tethered iPhone — and it follows that as it changes. To pin it to something specific, use Settings → Network → Measure → Chosen interfaces.
That happens on All interfaces, because the same bytes are counted once on the tunnel and once on the interface carrying it. The default setting, Active connection, does not have this problem.
It is the slowest interval that was actually moving data. A minimum that counted every idle second would read zero forever and tell you nothing, so intervals below about 4 KB/s are treated as "not transferring" and skipped.
Yes. A gap in sampling would otherwise turn into one enormous fake interval and pin your maximum for the rest of the session, so Netvane discards any interval that took much longer than it should have, rather than recording it. Press Reset in the panel to clear the statistics whenever you like.
macOS sometimes requires you to approve the item yourself. Check System Settings → General → Login Items and make sure Netvane is enabled there. If macOS refuses the request, Netvane puts its own toggle back to match reality rather than showing a setting that is not true.
It reads a small kernel structure once a second and draws a short line of text. If you want it lighter still, Settings → Network → Sample every goes up to five seconds, and the graph can be turned off in Settings → Display.
On your Mac, in Netvane's own sandbox container, and nowhere else. See the privacy policy for exactly what is stored.
Email syrioth@gmail.com and include your macOS version and what you were doing when it went wrong.