Jerome Del Ray

Q: Your internet on life support?  Blame Photos app.

Unbelievable.

 

This morning my internet slowed down to a crawl.  Noticed that iMac, iPhone, and iPad all crawling.  So I turned on my iPhone hotspot and waited it out.  (That works sometimes.)  It didn't this time.  Reset modem, airport, and such three times.  Broadband would come, then go.

 

Then I had a theory.  Maybe it was the iMac bringing the network down, since other devices were not really being used.  Turned off iMac.  Broadband explodes to 50 Megabit and stays steady.  Turned iMac back down, internet is crawling on it's knees.

 

So I open up Activity Monitor.  Under the network tab, something called 'nsurlsessiond' is sending packets everywhere.  I Google this process and learn it's buddies with iCloud. 

 

Then it hits me.  That weird 'pause for a day' button in Photos preferences.  I mean why not STOP AND START?  I'm like, "Did this thing turn on by itself?"  Opened up preferences, and yup -- Photos is trying to sneak upload what is still THOUSANDS of photos.

 

The problem here is that this isn't in the spirit of 'doing something in the background'.  Because it decimates what a user is doing in foreground.  This would be like if 'repair disk permissions' happened in the background... with no warning... for hours on end.

 

Again, unbelievable.  Hope this helps someone.

Posted on Apr 13, 2015 3:16 PM

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Q: Your internet on life support?  Blame Photos app.

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  • by Alley_Cat,

    Alley_Cat Alley_Cat Apr 15, 2015 12:46 PM in response to Drew Reece
    Level 6 (19,593 points)
    Apr 15, 2015 12:46 PM in response to Drew Reece

    Drew Reece wrote:

     

    Alley_Cat wrote:

     

    I think it's largely irrelevant if uploading is a background/foreground process, though for some people an ability to control upload bandwidth used would be helpful.  Perhaps their routers offer some QoS options which could be configured during large library uploads if there is no in-built solution.

     

     

    QoS (Quality of Service) could help here if you were willing to set it up, however it is a part of the router & network infrastructure, not the OS. As such it is beyond Apple's control for a huge percentage of users. Do Apples own routers even offer QoS?

     

    The solution is quite clear to me (and some others here), but unfortunately I don't know how to implement it (or have the time to test it).

     

    The OS needs to throttle the upload rate to a level that allows other outbound internet traffic to still function on the network - for each person that is likely to be a different value.

     

    Look at other apps that upload large quantities of data (Dropbox, BackBlaze, Mozy, Arq) even Torrent clients get this right! – They offer a preference to limit the upload rate, some offer automatic or time based throttling too (automatic throttling is an oxymoron - it can't know how other users are loading the internet connection but it is better than nothing).

    These throttling settings allow apps to upload whilst not killing other clients using the same internet connection. Apparently this is too complex for Apples users to understand - so Apple left this feature out.

     

    OS X 10.10 uses the 'pf firewall' - that can be configured to filter & throttle traffic from specific processes. I'd suggest that any experienced Mac user/ Unix admin takes a look at that. I think it needs to rely on 'dummynet' to achieve this, since Apple built the kernel without support for filtering per process in pf.

     

    Another more brutal option is to use Network Link Conditioner to alter all uploads on a Mac. It could help other users on the local network, but at the price of slowing all outbound data on the Mac.

    http://osxdaily.com/2011/08/10/simulate-internet-connectivity-bandwidth-speeds-n etwork-link-conditioner/

    That is part of Xcode.

     

    Configure network link conditioner & see how it edits the pf rules as a starting point would be my suggestion. Then look at how to limit the rules for a single process (or the 2 processes that have been mentioned here).

     

    This issue is 'solvable' IMO, but I don't know of any easy GUI apps that make it simple to do, so the answers involve reading manuals…

    https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/ man5/pf.conf.5.html

    https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/ man4/dummynet.4.html

     

    Frankly it is simpler to turn of iCloud uploads & wait for something to change, even with throttling there will be a long duration of uploads that effect other users on the network it just needs to be reduced to make it bearable.

    Great appraisal of the situation Drew.

  • by Tpebic,

    Tpebic Tpebic Apr 15, 2015 12:52 PM in response to Jerome Del Ray
    Level 1 (4 points)
    iCloud
    Apr 15, 2015 12:52 PM in response to Jerome Del Ray

    Yes this is the case, I ran a speed test over the fact that I needed results before freaking out at my ISP... I pulled 8.9 mbps download and a .17 upload then paused for one day with photos... Speeds went up to 24.8 for download and 1.87 for upload.

     

    Photos kills your internet trying to upload all your photos and stuff... I am so screwed, I have a 350gigs of photos with 10,000 raw... Going to take me a few weeks of this crap to get up online.

  • by Alley_Cat,

    Alley_Cat Alley_Cat Apr 15, 2015 12:56 PM in response to Tpebic
    Level 6 (19,593 points)
    Apr 15, 2015 12:56 PM in response to Tpebic
  • by Csound1,

    Csound1 Csound1 Apr 15, 2015 1:07 PM in response to Tpebic
    Level 9 (51,382 points)
    Desktops
    Apr 15, 2015 1:07 PM in response to Tpebic

    Tpebic wrote:

     

    Yes this is the case, I ran a speed test over the fact that I needed results before freaking out at my ISP... I pulled 8.9 mbps download and a .17 upload then paused for one day with photos... Speeds went up to 24.8 for download and 1.87 for upload.

     

    Photos kills your internet trying to upload all your photos and stuff... I am so screwed, I have a 350gigs of photos with 10,000 raw... Going to take me a few weeks of this crap to get up online.

    350GB uploaded at 1.87Mb/s is (best case) 604 hours, at .17Mb/s it would be somewhere between 64,818 and 97,222 hours

     

    Your connection is very slow.

  • by Alley_Cat,

    Alley_Cat Alley_Cat Apr 15, 2015 1:14 PM in response to Csound1
    Level 6 (19,593 points)
    Apr 15, 2015 1:14 PM in response to Csound1

    This thread is starting to baffle me.

     

    Most of the users here can probably do the maths and work out why it's taking so long with large libraries.  There's a lot of discussion around throttling which would only slow the process further.

     

    If anything to me there's a disconnect between Apple's eulogising over cloud services and actual practicality of iCloud usage in real life with real world internet speeds.

     

    My upload speed is a paltry 1 Mbps currently - I'm not even bothering to enable uploading to the cloud - if I did however i think i's start with an empty library and add things bit by bit to it, but that in itself would be a clumsy approach to a fundamental problem of lack of upload bandwidth in most cases.

     

    I really have no idea how many 100GB of photos and video I have but the cloud is not a realistic proposition for the whole of it for me - a select smaller library yes, but for archival/backup of my media I'll use physical external drives for the time being.

  • by Tpebic,

    Tpebic Tpebic Apr 15, 2015 1:19 PM in response to Csound1
    Level 1 (4 points)
    iCloud
    Apr 15, 2015 1:19 PM in response to Csound1

    I've only got about 10500 photos to go... It's be able to upload like 3000 in two days lol...

    I am just going to keep my eye on the prize with this one!

  • by Csound1,

    Csound1 Csound1 Apr 15, 2015 1:20 PM in response to Alley_Cat
    Level 9 (51,382 points)
    Desktops
    Apr 15, 2015 1:20 PM in response to Alley_Cat

    Alley_Cat wrote:

     

    This thread is starting to baffle me.

     

    Most of the users here can probably do the maths

    Not so sure about that.

    Alley_Cat wrote:

     

      There's a lot of discussion around throttling which would only slow the process further.

    Yes, I don't understand why they think that slowing down a process that they already think is too slow is going to help

    Alley_Cat wrote:

     

     

    If anything to me there's a disconnect between Apple's eulogising over cloud services and actual practicality of iCloud usage in real life with real world internet speeds.

     

    My upload speed is a paltry 1 Mbps currently - I'm not even bothering to enable uploading to the cloud - if I did however i think i's start with an empty library and add things bit by bit to it, but that in itself would be a clumsy approach to a fundamental problem of lack of upload bandwidth in most cases.

     

    I really have no idea how many 100GB of photos and video I have but the cloud is not a realistic proposition for the whole of it - a select smaller library yes, but for archival/backup of my media I'll use physical external drives for the time being.

    Most people simply don't connect the dots it seems. connections that are so slow they barely qualify as 'broadband' and hundreds of Gigabytes are a real bad couple

     

    Alley_Cat wrote:

     

    This thread is starting to baffle me.

    All part of the vast carnival of life

  • by Csound1,

    Csound1 Csound1 Apr 15, 2015 1:23 PM in response to Tpebic
    Level 9 (51,382 points)
    Desktops
    Apr 15, 2015 1:23 PM in response to Tpebic

    My library (17,000 photos, some videos) took 4 days to complete, I have 8Mb/s upload, not slow but not fast either.

  • by Alley_Cat,

    Alley_Cat Alley_Cat Apr 15, 2015 1:26 PM in response to Csound1
    Level 6 (19,593 points)
    Apr 15, 2015 1:26 PM in response to Csound1

    I just gave up trying to copy a 27GB file to a drive connected to a device on the LAN - it was going to take 4 hours using the afp connection and powerline networking - heavens know how long it would take if I was uploading to iCloud.  I'll just disconnect that USB drive and transfer in a couple of mins over USB 3.

  • by Alley_Cat,

    Alley_Cat Alley_Cat Apr 15, 2015 1:27 PM in response to Csound1
    Level 6 (19,593 points)
    Apr 15, 2015 1:27 PM in response to Csound1

    Csound1 wrote:

     

    Alley_Cat wrote:

     

    This thread is starting to baffle me.

     

    Most of the users here can probably do the maths

    Not so sure about that.

     

    OK, they can probably do the 'math'

  • by Drew Reece,

    Drew Reece Drew Reece Apr 15, 2015 1:35 PM in response to Alley_Cat
    Level 5 (7,798 points)
    Notebooks
    Apr 15, 2015 1:35 PM in response to Alley_Cat

    I agree, there is a genuine issue here combined with some unrealistic expectations of how data can move around. Care needs to be taken to avoid mixing up what is possible from what is a bad side effect of one device hogging all the internet connection.

     

    For anyone who wants to convert speeds & sizes here is an example…

    http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=100+gigabytes+at+1+megabits+per+second

    (100GB's at 1Mb/sec)

    Result: 9 days 6 hours (if the connection is constant).

     

     

    NOTES:

    megabit it the bits speed out the internet outbound

    gigabytes is the size of your Photo library

    You have to take care with the units – bits (b) are not the same as Bytes (B). The input interpretation on Wolfram Alpha will show you what it thinks you asked for.

     

    Get info on your Photo library for a rough size indication, numbers of images & videos is not very relevant, file size is.

  • by tdavenport,

    tdavenport tdavenport May 14, 2015 4:38 PM in response to Jerome Del Ray
    Level 1 (0 points)
    May 14, 2015 4:38 PM in response to Jerome Del Ray

    I also had the same problem.  My Comcast account (60 mbps download, 6 mbps upload) was constantly timing out.  At first I thought it was a problem with an Airport Extreme router I just installed.  But after connecting my computer directly to the Comcast modem, the timeouts continued.  I called Comcast and they confirmed many timeouts were happening.  They scheduled a technician appointment and suggested I go to the local Comcast store and swap out the modem.  I did all of that and the timeouts continued. Then, on a hunch, I opened up Photos and paused the automatic uploads, and all of my problems went away.  (I hadn't thought of this earlier because Photos wasn't open and I made the false assumption that it would only upload when the program was active)

    Bottom line: As long as iPhotos is actively uploading Photos my internet is worthless.  So I have totally disabled automatic uploading in the iCloud preferences panel (System Preferences) and (if I remember,) will only turn it on overnight.  I just wish this had been an option all along; to schedule an upload time when all other devices are not active, or at least to have an option to give preference to activities such as surfing, movie streaming etc with iCloud updating only happening when the computer senses light use on other devices. I am waiting patiently for Apple to fix this issue.

  • by robnbill,

    robnbill robnbill May 19, 2015 4:04 PM in response to Jerome Del Ray
    Level 1 (36 points)
    Apple Watch
    May 19, 2015 4:04 PM in response to Jerome Del Ray

    Someone mentioned Link Conditioner in an earlier post.  This link provides some interesting information.  It's easy enough to do.

     

    https://mayallit.wordpress.com/2015/04/23/how-to-fix-apple-photos-icloud-photo-l ibrary-upload-using-network-link-conditioner/

     

    I'll try it out when I'm ready to turn on iCloud Photos - which will be soon.  I have a high speed upload and download connection.  While I hit 80 Mbs up and down - that's within the ISP's network.  A better real world test is DSLReports.com.  I'll post my results from iCloud Photos uploads at some point.

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