Señor Josué

Q: iCloud Photo Library upload killing internet connection

The new iCloud Photo Library is killing my cable internet connection. It will upload for a little while, greatly slowing down my internet access until eventually it just kills my connection. I have to reset my modem, and Photos will upload a bit more before grinding my connection to a halt again. This is ridiculous, and if I can't get it resolved I'm not going to use this "great new feature" and will stop paying for the extra storage, which I won't need if I go back to Photo Stream.

iMac, OS X Yosemite (10.10.3)

Posted on Apr 13, 2015 7:37 AM

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Q: iCloud Photo Library upload killing internet connection

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  • by notcloudy,

    notcloudy notcloudy Apr 18, 2015 7:21 PM in response to kimhelliwell
    Level 4 (1,190 points)
    Desktops
    Apr 18, 2015 7:21 PM in response to kimhelliwell

    kimhelliwell wrote:

     

    I have a hard time understanding why Apple engineers would not anticipate the size of libraries that people would want to upload when they are selling up to 1 TB of space. I only have the 200 MB tier, and I'm uploading a library that's only about 50 MB, and it's taking DAYS to upload, and meanwhile killing my download speed as well. The Network tab of the Activity Monitor on  my Mac is reporting the upload speed to be about 130-150 kbps, which is a fraction of the upload speed my ISP guarantees (about 1/6 of so).

     

    I have been talking with my provider, who said they could see I was not getting the targeted 864 kbps upload speed I was entitled to, and they sent out a tech to look into it. His diagnosis was that the wiring to the jack I was using was faulty, and he rewired it and got things working correctly. After that, my upload speed for the photos went from 80-100 kbps to the above stated 130-150 kbps. So the upload speeded up by about 40%, but not to the level it could and should be at.

     

    And that concerns me. Either there is a systematic bug in the code (icloudd) that does the upload, or Apple is throttling upload speeds to a fraction of the available bandwidth to preserve their servers from overload.

     

    Whatever the case, I hope that Apple will come clean on this and come up with a fix.

     

    Have you every done multiple downloads at the same time with the download window open?   As you add them, the ones that are running start to show longer and longer estimated times - because they are sharing the same inbound road to the same destination.   

     

    On uploads you are going to a destination with other peoples uploads - so stands to reason - many people uploading to the same destination would slow processing down as each of you have your data written to the drives.

     

    Distance can play a part in problems in transmission - if apple tested uploads only within silicon valley -- with only small number of pictures - to a server in silicon valley - then the speeds they saw did not represent what users would get in the real world.

  • by evang007,

    evang007 evang007 Apr 18, 2015 11:13 PM in response to Señor Josué
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Apr 18, 2015 11:13 PM in response to Señor Josué

    Same issue. Never had this problem before switching over to Photos from iPhoto.

  • by gjlamb,

    gjlamb gjlamb Apr 19, 2015 12:26 AM in response to Señor Josué
    Level 1 (28 points)
    iCloud
    Apr 19, 2015 12:26 AM in response to Señor Josué

    Theres definitely something wrong with this process. If I have only the one computer doing the Photos upload, it still takes longer than it should.  I have a 5500 photo library plus videos to upload.  So far over the week I've barely got 1000 photos uploaded.  I ran another test this morning and resumed the upload and went out for the day.  I was out 5 hours and the count only went down by 1 photo.  Something is definitely wrong and even though my upload speed is only 1000Mbps, I should have been able to upload more than 1 photo in 5 hours!!

  • by notcloudy,

    notcloudy notcloudy Apr 19, 2015 6:36 AM in response to gjlamb
    Level 4 (1,190 points)
    Desktops
    Apr 19, 2015 6:36 AM in response to gjlamb

    gjlamb wrote:

     

    Theres definitely something wrong with this process. If I have only the one computer doing the Photos upload, it still takes longer than it should.  I have a 5500 photo library plus videos to upload.  So far over the week I've barely got 1000 photos uploaded.  I ran another test this morning and resumed the upload and went out for the day.  I was out 5 hours and the count only went down by 1 photo.  Something is definitely wrong and even though my upload speed is only 1000Mbps, I should have been able to upload more than 1 photo in 5 hours!!

     

    It means you had a line problem immediately -- I have had downloads from apple update get stuck like that in a bit of a never ending loop where if caught in time all I had to do was pause it disconnect and try later -- if it actually did throw an error -usually cannot write this to disk - if the line was still up - could go back into the download - it would pick up where it left off usually a some place before it started.   

     

    If you are in an area where cable/telephone/electric company are replacing telephone poles and moving wiring over - that can cause hiccups.

     

    During a long (for me) download I check it about every 1/2 hour and move that window around on the scree (that restarts the clock on putting your monitor to sleep)  

     

    If you know where your data is going to - or coming from its easy to check to see what mother nature if up to -- if  you don't it can be frustrating.

     

    Give Apple feedback at http://www.apple.com/feedback/

    In that case include your location so they may trace what is happening.

  • by MRextreme,

    MRextreme MRextreme Apr 19, 2015 7:11 AM in response to Señor Josué
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Apr 19, 2015 7:11 AM in response to Señor Josué

    Lets all provide feedback and hopefully Apple will fix the problem

    The more of us the more the chances:

     

    http://www.apple.com/feedback/

  • by Mack Palm Springs,

    Mack Palm Springs Mack Palm Springs Apr 19, 2015 7:47 AM in response to notcloudy
    Level 1 (5 points)
    Mac OS X
    Apr 19, 2015 7:47 AM in response to notcloudy

    To Not Cloudy:

     

    I know you are trying to help - and Thank you.  But in this you are wrong.  There are too many people with this problem.  I support about a dozen friends and family - across the country.  Different ISPs, different plans.  The problem is WIDESPREAD - not isolated.  (As an IT professional with 4 decades of experience and 3 decades in TCP/IP  and a Mac since Macintosh 1984 - I believe this is a protocol issue of some sort.  Some "deadly embrace" in the download.  But this speculation on my part. It is what I see from Little Snitch and iStats telling me who is using the network during the download attempts.)

     

    I will tell anyone to AVOID Photos on iCloud until I see (on this post or some new show) that this is fixed.

  • by Mack Palm Springs,

    Mack Palm Springs Mack Palm Springs Apr 19, 2015 7:48 AM in response to MRextreme
    Level 1 (5 points)
    Mac OS X
    Apr 19, 2015 7:48 AM in response to MRextreme

    Good idea .  I posted my plea to Apple just now.

  • by Tim Bloom1,

    Tim Bloom1 Tim Bloom1 Apr 19, 2015 8:00 AM in response to Señor Josué
    Level 1 (110 points)
    Apr 19, 2015 8:00 AM in response to Señor Josué

    I'd like to put to bed the notion that this issue is (for most people here) an internet speed issue. We are all well aware that uploads will take a while. So far I've pushed up about 300GB into my iCloud Photos library.  I've anticipated the internet slowness that will come with it. I'm quite knowledgeable in this field, as I'm working with networks day in and day out.

    The symptom  that I am seeing is nearly identical to other users here, and I've been troubleshooting it for days thinking that my cable modem just was going out, though it's a fairly new SB6120.  I'm curious if the others that are running into this issue are using the same model modem.  What seems to happen is one of 2 things:

    1. Cable modem stops passing traffic to ISP gateway. In this state I can reset the modem by using it's web interface and rebooting the modem.

    2. Cable modem stops answering all requests. Wont respond to ping, will no longer respond to web requests for its status page (http://192.168.100.1). In this state, I need to physically power cycle the modem for it to return to a functional state.

     

    This has never happened previous to the iCloud photo library upload. I have a WatchGuard firewall in place, that I initially suspected was somehow blocking the traffic due to its advanced scanning and blocking features, but I've disabled nearly everything in this troubleshooting process to no avail.

     

    All the lights on the modem remain on in a normal state of operation, so the cable modem itself believes it's still online. My guess would be that there's something with the packets that's locking up the cable-ethernet bridge in the modem, though the logs in the modem don't seem to be reporting anything out of the ordinary (which usually only logs the cable/WAN side anyway from my experience).  This issue may completely be in the modem, but just triggered by something Apple is doing in their upload. Or it may have something to do with the ISP's system possibly blocking suspicious traffic. 

  • by Tim Bloom1,

    Tim Bloom1 Tim Bloom1 Apr 19, 2015 8:02 AM in response to Mack Palm Springs
    Level 1 (110 points)
    Apr 19, 2015 8:02 AM in response to Mack Palm Springs

    Could you report on your model modem? I'd like to see if this is possibly isolated to a single model modem.

  • by Csound1,

    Csound1 Csound1 Apr 19, 2015 8:05 AM in response to kimhelliwell
    Level 9 (50,412 points)
    Desktops
    Apr 19, 2015 8:05 AM in response to kimhelliwell

    kimhelliwell wrote:

     

    I have a hard time understanding why Apple engineers would not anticipate the size of libraries that people would want to upload when they are selling up to 1 TB of space. I only have the 200 MB tier, and I'm uploading a library that's only about 50 MB, and it's taking DAYS to upload, and meanwhile killing my download speed as well. The Network tab of the Activity Monitor on  my Mac is reporting the upload speed to be about 130-150 kbps, which is a fraction of the upload speed my ISP guarantees (about 1/6 of so).

     

    I have been talking with my provider, who said they could see I was not getting the targeted 864 kbps upload speed I was entitled to, and they sent out a tech to look into it. His diagnosis was that the wiring to the jack I was using was faulty, and he rewired it and got things working correctly. After that, my upload speed for the photos went from 80-100 kbps to the above stated 130-150 kbps. So the upload speeded up by about 40%, but not to the level it could and should be at.

     

    And that concerns me. Either there is a systematic bug in the code (icloudd) that does the upload, or Apple is throttling upload speeds to a fraction of the available bandwidth to preserve their servers from overload.

     

    Whatever the case, I hope that Apple will come clean on this and come up with a fix.

    If your library is only 50MB it should take a couple of minutes, but I assume you meant 50GB

     

    Test your actual upload speed (internet provider claims are marketing, not always fact) test it on this site speedof.me

  • by evang007,

    evang007 evang007 Apr 19, 2015 8:06 AM in response to Tim Bloom1
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Apr 19, 2015 8:06 AM in response to Tim Bloom1

    I Have a SB6121

  • by evang007,

    evang007 evang007 Apr 19, 2015 8:07 AM in response to Tim Bloom1
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Apr 19, 2015 8:07 AM in response to Tim Bloom1

    Motorola SB6121

  • by Csound1,

    Csound1 Csound1 Apr 19, 2015 8:09 AM in response to gjlamb
    Level 9 (50,412 points)
    Desktops
    Apr 19, 2015 8:09 AM in response to gjlamb

    gjlamb wrote:

     

    Theres definitely something wrong with this process. If I have only the one computer doing the Photos upload, it still takes longer than it should.

    How long "should" it take?

    gjlamb wrote:

     

    Something is definitely wrong and even though my upload speed is only 1000Mbps,

    Your upload speed is not 1000Mb/s, it's not even 100Mb/s measure it, your guesses are so far out you will be very disappointed

     

    Measure your upload speed (at this site) it's better than guessing.

  • by MRextreme,

    MRextreme MRextreme Apr 19, 2015 9:02 AM in response to Mack Palm Springs
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Apr 19, 2015 9:02 AM in response to Mack Palm Springs

    Thanks!

  • by MRextreme,

    MRextreme MRextreme Apr 19, 2015 9:03 AM in response to Tim Bloom1
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Apr 19, 2015 9:03 AM in response to Tim Bloom1

    Mototola - Arris SB6141

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