Q: iCloud Photo Library upload killing internet connection

The heart of this thread is cable modems locking up from the iCloud Photos uploader. Not slow speed during uploads. I have 150Mbps/20Mbps service, and regularly max it out with Crashplan and other cloud services. I wish people would be leaving bandwidth issues out of this thread, since it's not really the discussion.

Over the last week I've pushed up around 400GB of a 600GB library, I'm impressed with their ability to handle that kind of incoming traffic well, but that's also not the purpose of the thread. It's locking up the cable modem.

I work with many clients, with worse connections than this, and we usually will do their offsite backups over cable modem. Being small/medium businesses, they usually run their internet on the cheapest tier they can get by on, so often times 1/10th of what I'm using here and with the same model modem all around town. When doing the initial push of their backups we are almost always saturating the modem in this same manner for weeks on end until we get the initial push completed, and then smooth sailing from then on with just deltas nightly. This doesn't have the same behavior whatsoever. Nobody's cable modem locks up from that.

Could we put the speed thing to bed, and let that happen in another thread?

You are welcome to post as you wish, however you are not at all welcome to decide what I post.

I fully agree. This case has very little to do with modem speed.

I have also uploaded Gigabyte to other services without having the modem to hang-up.

The subject is: iCloud Photo Library upload killing internet connection

So lets stay to that. And people are can have other threads where calculation of upload time etc. can come to debate.

Yes hopefully we can get back on track and try and resolve the issue.....I don't mind having to wait for the upload to happen but it's annoying that everything else grounds to a standstill and I have to reboot the modem to get everything flowing again.

For another data point:

When I try to upload anything to iCloud (Photos or files to my iCloud Drive) it kills my entire internet connection. 

You are right, it is NOT about the speed at which things upload to iCloud; it is about the fact that uploading to iCloud kills the connection. 

I had my cable provider out to look at it.  Everything is fine from their end.  I can upload and download with other sites/services.  It really is isolated to iCloud.  I get the same issue, downloads are slowed WAY down while I am uploading and go back to normal when I pause the download.  If I let it upload long enough then it usually completely kills the connection and I have to do a hard reset of my modem. 

Very odd; I hope Apple is fixing this but I have never heard of an issue like this. 

To all

After the usual back door entry into Apple support system the following sites may help you out as it certainly clarified Icloud and photo for me.

iphoto getting started

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204655

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204410

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204264

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204414

If I were to use PHOTO and the ICLOUD which I am not - my designated system photo library ( the one that synchronizes across devices)  would contain only current pictures synchronized from other devices and I would move them out of that library to a other ones rather than keep them in the ICLOUD.

In the development of PHOTOS and the ICLOUD it looks like that is what Apple was aiming at - - as they also tell you to back up your photos on your own devices.

Biggest issue I have with Apple is that it is a struggle to get detailed instructions on their software.  

Oh and for those having trouble converting there are instructions on how to do it in pieces.

I have similar connection speeds as Tim (150MbDown/25MbUp), and the iCloud Photo Library does cause my Motorola SB modem to hang.  I seem to recall having similar problems with syncing photo streams in Aperture. 

This is a hard problem to pin down unless one has a good understanding of what's going on at the cable modem.  Logs are very limited on the cable modem, and gathering information via SNMP is disabled by my provider.  I do use a cloud base backup solution, and have managed to backup several TB of data without ever having the cable modem lockup.  Granted the backup software works differently than Photos/iCloud, and supports throttling/QOS.  Anyway, it would be nice to be able to tweak upload speed settings for iCloud.  Maybe it's time to fire up Wireshark, and see what's going on network wise.  I don't see any FIOS users complaining, so my guess is the problem is with the cable modem and it's interactions with iCloud.

The following will address the issue for many users until Apple makes a real fix. This fix limits the upload speed from your computer. It appears that some ISPs (mine is Comcast) heavily throttle your connection if your computer is hitting the limit. I've been running limited at 80% upload speed for 24 hours with no problem.

This fix is easy but a bit geeky. You will use Apple's Network Link Conditioner (NLC) system preference panel from the Apple Developer site to limit your network connection speed.

1. Download the NLC system preference from the Apple Developer's site. It is part of the Hardware IO Tools.
2. Install the NLC system preference.
3. Open the NLC system preference and create a new profile.
4. Limit the Uplink speed. I tried both 60% and 80% of my available uplink bandwidth and they seemed to work OK.
5. Set the Downlink limit to something at least close to your ISP's bandwidth or above.

You'll probably need to play around with the limits. Remember that it affects all of the network traffic in and out of the computer so something like a Time Capsule backup might go really slowly.

Here's the setting I used:

Now that's a pretty good workaround. I'll give it a shot before I throw more photos in my library tonight. i have about 20k more to go.

Thanks mayall -- definitely going to give this a shot tonight!

Thanks mayall.  This workaround seems to be working for me so far.  I'll check in the morning and report back.  I have also seen this problem with iTunes Match when iTunes uploads songs that it cannot match.  I'll be so happy if this works.

I can confirm that this workaround has fixed the issue on my Mac.  Thanks again mayall.

I'm having a little trouble with the Network Link Conditioner tool -- it installed fine, and I set it to restrict my upload bandwidth to 1.0 Mbps (which would halve my TWC upload max of 2.0 Mbps). However, when I run a speed test after setting it up, I'm still getting ~2.0 Mpbs upload speeds. Any thoughts? Maybe I should try setting it to 1,000 kpbs instead, even though that should be the same thing.

Since only whole numbers are allowed, I found it more flexible to use Kbps. Using Kbps lets you enter smaller increments or a bandwidth of less then 1 Mbps. For example, I am using 3500 Kbps since you cannot enter 3.5 Mbps.

Thanks mayall -- will give it another shot this evening.