Bandwidth Spikes for Long periods while being idle

Does anyone know exactly what the bandwidth is doing when it spikes? What it is downloading, because there are times I am just sitting in my home 750m up not doing anything, and my bandwidth spikes to over 1000kbps for several minutes. Today it was doing it for like 5-10mins. What is it doing?

Yes, I'm wondering this as well.

Why is my bandwidth consumption so huge if all I'm doing is just sitting there.
The US users might not mind consuming bandwidth while being 'idle', but the most UK users have ISP that have 'download' limits.

Thanks in advance!

Are avatars comming and going out of the sim you are in?, im idling alot in SL usually when mine go up its cause someone entered sim, or something just got rezzed.

~.~ SL is a truly a bandwidth hog, just this month SL used for me ;

3,401 mb download
361 mb upload

and thats 12 days :>

mmm then you're using the wrong provider, change it !
As a deep rural UK user in Dorset I have a choice of at least 5 providers, only one of those (BT) insists on bandwidth capping. Surely you have a better choice.

And as for what SL is doing, it's downloading everything you can't and will never want to see and fetching the attachments for all those AVs in the sim next door and filling your cache with so much crap that next time you turn your head all your local textures will disappear and need to be refetched.

Not helpful I know, but it's great to be able to rant about it.