Did indeed just shorten it. 
Take a look using performance monitor. Check the flightsimulator.exe to isolate only that activity…
Even with everything (data) turned off in the sim there is a persistent data connection that is transferring small packages all the time when in flight.
In the main menu there is a lot more activity but that must be related to menu assets loading.
I shut down all online functionality over the weekend and enabled each part one at a time trying to trace which connections were serving which function and which had the most/least impact on performance.
Still a work in progress which I won’t get time to look into in greater depth until this coming weekend, but there is definitely constant data transfer even will every data setting I could find set to disabled.
Diags/performance data could actually be gathered using the DevMode tools and MS already have the capability/tools to collect system data, this would seem like a wasted opportunity to streamline fault finding if it’s not already being done.
(After all, compared to what we stream live during a flight it would be a very small package.)