latency and CPU usage

not sure where to put this but it seems lately that the alpha client along with 6.18+6.19 have been slow to respond, with more frequent glitching, and looking at resource monitor its hogging up hundreds of thousands of kb to process. 400K or more? i have a quad core and theyre running at 80% more or less, just having client open. not queing, not in store or swaping profile pages, not chatting, just idles at 400k Kb/s. where normally b4 it would idle at 100k Kb/s. 400% increase in processing consumption has me wondering whats going on, anybody else experiencing the same?