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

Close

Q: iCloud Photo Library upload killing internet connection

  • All replies
  • Helpful answers

first Previous Page 7 of 9 last Next
  • by dbkusa,

    dbkusa dbkusa May 13, 2015 6:17 PM in response to Señor Josué
    Level 1 (0 points)
    May 13, 2015 6:17 PM in response to Señor Josué

    I found the following  in another forum and followed it it works great!!

     

    I've been struggling with Photo for a few weeks and this finally solved it.

     

     

    This is geeky but seems to work: Use Apple's Network Link Conditioner (NLC) to limit the upload speed from your computer.

     

    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 chose about 60% of my available uplink bandwidth and that seems 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, really slowly.


    Here's the setting I used:


    Blank_Skitch_Document.png

     

  • by dumbeblonde,

    dumbeblonde dumbeblonde May 15, 2015 8:59 PM in response to dbkusa
    Level 1 (0 points)
    May 15, 2015 8:59 PM in response to dbkusa

    I too have struggled with this problem and found parts of this post to be very helpful.  I found some success with the Network Link Conditioner.  Dialed down to 1MB/sec, I was able to stay connected to the internet.  But my job was large (200GB) and my upload speed is 6MB/sec, so I wanted things to go faster.  I also didn't understand why I wasn't able to get more than 1MB/sec upload speed without losing internet connection.  This is application specific.  I can upload from other applications and get the full 6MB/sec.  I can combine uploads from Photos and other applications and get 6MB/sec.  But I can't get more than 1MB/sec with Photos for very long before my internet connection is dropped.

     

    Next I had the Xfinity tech come and run tests and replace cables, etc.  One interesting test was to monitor the connection through a splitter and stop and start the Photos upload and see if anything could be observed.  Nothing.  As far as Xfinity is concerned, the internet connection was good.  This indicated that the problem was with my modem or with my router.


    I have/had an Arris Surfboard modem and early in this debugging had tried replacing it with the same to no effect.  Now I decided to try replacing it with a Zoom 5341J with the Broadcom chip, not the Texas Instruments chip, per the recommendation of another poster.  What is very interesting about this is that according to the Activity Monitor, the I still was getting just shy of 1MB/sec WITHOUT the Network Link Conditioner on!  No loss of internet connection.  All stable, but still not 6MB/sec.


    This led me to look into the specs of the new modem and I discovered that it employs a process called "Flow Control."  Apparently there are different types of this.  The idea is that the receiving router communicates to the sending router when the latter is sending faster than the former can receive.  The sending router, if it has flow control technology, with then throttle the sending, much in the way that the Network Link Conditioner does.  The Arris Surfboard does not have this technology or it doesn't work.  I don't know if it's choking because it's misinterpreting communication from the receiving router or because it's in effect getting backed up trying to send too much data too fast.


    The takeaway is that Apple must not have the door wide open, so to speak, to Photos uploads.  It must be limiting the upload speed.  I couldn't find anything on limits for Photos specifically posted by Apple, but I did find this:

     

    From Apple Help:

    My Photo Stream upload limits

    The My Photo Stream limits below are based on anticipated upload patterns. These are the My Photo Stream upload limits:

     

    Uploads to My Photo Stream per hour: 1000 photos

    Uploads to My Photo Stream per day: 10,000 photos

    Uploads to My Photo Stream per month: 25,000 photos

    If you exceed one of these limits, your uploads to My Photo Stream will pause temporarily, and you might see a notification on your device. Your uploads will resume automatically when you no longer exceed the limit, such as in the following hour or on the following day.

     

    iCloud Photo Sharing limits

    These are the iCloud Photo Sharing hourly and daily limits:

     

    Maximum combined number of photos and videos from all contributors per shared album, per hour: 1000

    Maximum combined number of photos and videos from all contributors per shared album, per day: 10,000

    These sharing limits are separate from the upload limits above. For example, in the same day you could upload 10,000 photos to My Photo Stream, then share those 10,000 photos or 10,000 other photos.

     

    Anyway, if you're still struggling, you don't need to replace your router, you just need to use the Network Link Conditioner, dial it to 1MB/sec max, be patient and complain to Apple.

  • by thomasfromsomis,

    thomasfromsomis thomasfromsomis May 25, 2015 6:39 PM in response to Señor Josué
    Level 1 (0 points)
    May 25, 2015 6:39 PM in response to Señor Josué

    Photos hogs the entire upload bandwidth witch in turn kills downloads.

    in photos preferences you can pause for a day, but there are no other more usefull options, like pause for an hour or until midnigh, or only use 60% of my maximum demonstrated bandwidth or limit upload to 1mbs..

    And if God forbid you sign out of iCloud you are forced to reupload everything all over agin even though is already in the iCloud.com library aparenty it can't md5 or rsync for some mind boggling reason, so you then get to spend another week waiting to reupload unable to use internet because photos hogs it all.

    Why isn't this page iPhone friendly????

    yes I know most people have access to true broadband But about 20% of us don't . Cellular tethering  is $10 gb, satellite has 50 gb cap, I have DSL and no options that would not cost $2000.00 plus a month

    so having to reupload is very painful!!!!!!!

    I used  rsync 15 years ago, it only syncs changed bits !!!!

    If apple wasn't so busy trying to justify its beats acquisition maybe they would've gotten photos right

  • by thomasfromsomis,

    thomasfromsomis thomasfromsomis May 26, 2015 10:51 AM in response to thomasfromsomis
    Level 1 (0 points)
    May 26, 2015 10:51 AM in response to thomasfromsomis

    It's simple if you saturate upload bandwidth nothing will download, most ISP's, modems work this way. 90% of traffic is downstream and most people just simply never noticed, Including the young bandwidth spoiled SF apple programer - testers!

     

    My Issue is mainly is, why upload the same photo or movie twice????

    I used  rsync 15 years ago, it only syncs changed bits !!!!  (with the right settings)

    WHY would any sane person transfer 100's of gigs twice if the file already exsits on the other side??????????????

     

    My file are all uploaded at iCloud.com but, every mac i connect to it with an identical set of photos, it wants to re-upload the exact same photos agin??

    and you can't do anything until it does!


    Photos hogs the entire upload bandwidth witch in turn kills downloads.

    in photos preferences you can pause for a day, but there are no other more usefull options, like pause for an hour or until midnigh, or only use 60% of my maximum demonstrated bandwidth or limit upload to 1mbs..

    And if God forbid you sign out of iCloud you are forced to reupload everything all over agin even though is already in the iCloud.com library aparenty it can't md5 or rsync for some mind boggling reason, so you then get to spend another week waiting to reupload unable to use internet because photos hogs it all.

    Why isn't this page iPhone friendly????

    yes I know most people have access to true broadband But about 20% of us don't . Cellular tethering  is $10 gb, satellite has 50 gb cap, I have DSL and no options that would not cost $2000.00 plus a month

    so having to reupload is very painful!!!!!!!

    I used  rsync 15 years ago, it only syncs changed bits !!!!

    If apple wasn't so busy trying to justify its beats acquisition maybe they would've gotten photos right

     

    There is no way to sign out of iCloud without having to re-upload everything????

    I have the same problem! re-uploading 120gb on dsl Unacceptable!

    I cannot buy faster internet at my house! believe me I have tried they all want $10 a gb for sat or cell witch would come to $2,500.00 per month. for 250gb

    I had to sign out of iCloud and when I signed back in 1 min later it wants to re-upload! I'm screwed I give UP it killed my internet for a week and i had to go sit at Starbucks 60mbs up-down Google-Starbucks wifi for 6 hours! not doing it again.

    There is no upload time calculator!

    There is no pause for 2 hours option, so it restarts after i fall asleep watching Netflix !

    There is no suggestion to remove videos

    There is no explanation that it will convert each video as it gets to it and will NOT upload until that conversion is done! and it won't convert till upload is done!

    There is no way to pre-convert video's so you could then go some where with fast upload!

    There is no way to sign out of iCloud without having to re-upload everything

    There is no explanation that it uploads the newest pictures and videos first and works backwards in time to oldest pic.

    Its as if they don't even know what RSYNC is !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    Why the jrgxf8onrg87cf would it re upload the exact same 120 gb????????

    Unacceptable!!!!!!!!!!!! rqedy2tyjy3fjuv

    Look I understand that photos converts videos  before uploading and after this basically analog conversion the video MD5 hash's would not match, But that dosn't mean you can't tag the files in a meta  tag so photos knows they were originally  a match! , and then not reconvert it and re-upload it.



     

  • by Damien McKenna,

    Damien McKenna Damien McKenna May 31, 2015 6:50 PM in response to Señor Josué
    Level 1 (0 points)
    May 31, 2015 6:50 PM in response to Señor Josué

    Another Motorola cable modem owner, another frustrated Photos user who's dreams of having his family's photo catalog sync'd across multiple laptops and iOS devices dashed against the rocks. And yes, I've had Crashplan upload multi-hundred GB HDs from multiple computers without any problems, though for accuracy purposes the last multi-hundred GB upload to Crashplan was *before* I got the Motorola modem.

    Hoping Apple work on tuning this better.

  • by galleywoodman,

    galleywoodman galleywoodman Jun 1, 2015 12:18 AM in response to Señor Josué
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Jun 1, 2015 12:18 AM in response to Señor Josué

    I'm taking the advice of many to download and install the Network Link Conditioner from the Apple IO Tools site - but I can't find it! I've no doubt that it's staring at me - but would really appreciate if someone can point out exactly where to find it!

     

    Thanks

  • by mayall,

    mayall mayall Jun 1, 2015 9:21 AM in response to galleywoodman
    Level 1 (25 points)
    Jun 1, 2015 9:21 AM in response to galleywoodman
  • by mayall,

    mayall mayall Jun 1, 2015 9:23 AM in response to dbkusa
    Level 1 (25 points)
    Jun 1, 2015 9:23 AM in response to dbkusa
  • by Ulf-Malvern,

    Ulf-Malvern Ulf-Malvern Jun 3, 2015 8:46 PM in response to Señor Josué
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Jun 3, 2015 8:46 PM in response to Señor Josué

    Wow quite a busy forum. Thanks for posting the issue, which I also experience. When the MacBookPro does its uploading to the cloud in the background the internet speed for the entire household will get so sluggish that it's essentially unusable. Yes, we only have a somewhat slow ADSL line - but normal upload and download processes seem to happily coincide and share the line -- until the MacBookPro does its thing. What is frustrating is that the typical Apple user will have absolutely no idea of what is happening - yet his or her computer is the bully in the home: all other internet traffic gets slowed to a crawl. So the novice will think "the internet service provider" is at fault, "need faster connection". No, what is needed a more considerate programming style, taking into account the notion that not everybody has fiber optic cable connections that speedily upload large amounts of photos.

    The best way to work around this is to turn the cloud off.

    The second best is to throttle the offender, kind of like putting shackles on the bully so that the bully can't continue to kick others off the playground. The program to help is Network Link Conditioner. Description at https://mayallit.wordpress.com/2015/04/23/how-to-fix-apple-photos-icloud-photo-l ibrary-upload-using-network-link-conditi…

    Try to get installed at your next One-to-One

    Good luck!

  • by ClutchDynamite,

    ClutchDynamite ClutchDynamite Jun 13, 2015 10:03 AM in response to Ulf-Malvern
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Jun 13, 2015 10:03 AM in response to Ulf-Malvern

    The search function doesn't seem to be working on the developers site, and I can't locate the NLC download.  Is there another place to find it?

  • by DominikB,

    DominikB DominikB Jul 15, 2015 8:16 PM in response to morrispe
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Jul 15, 2015 8:16 PM in response to morrispe

    I was having the same issue, the upload was completely killing my network. Internet was practically disabled.

     

    I've decided to investigate more and it seems like it's a WiFi issue, not the modem/bandwidth issue.

     

    I use an Airport Extreme and a Motorola SB6141 (Texas Instruments chip) modem.

     

    When I disable WiFi and use an Ethernet cable directly to my MacBook Air, internet is completely usable and fast even without using Network Line Conditioner. I am now uploading at full speed via an Ethernet cable end everything is rock solid, fast and stable.

     

    On a WiFi, things seem to improve a lot when I force-use the 5Ghz. If you have the ability to choose between a 5Ghz and 2.4Ghz WiFi network, you can try to connect to the 5Ghz and make your device(s) forget the 2.4Ghz one, at least temporarily until you complete the iCloud Photo upload.

     

    For reference, I live in a tiny house with many WiFi devices all close to the router, but I'm not sure if it matters.

     

    (As others noted, Dropbox does not have this issue.)

  • by kwetzaas,

    kwetzaas kwetzaas Jul 27, 2015 11:05 AM in response to Ulf-Malvern
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Jul 27, 2015 11:05 AM in response to Ulf-Malvern

    But is the problem only related to upload from Mac? What about iPhone and iPad uploading to Photos or iCloud in general? Is the network line conditioner available also for those devices?

     

    Actually, I have had problems with my broadband telephony probably caused by iCloud syncing. I could hear the voice of those I spoke with, but the other one could only hear me partly. I think the problems started in May or something when I started using Photos and iCloud Photo Library instead of Photostream.

     

    My speed has been 30 MB/s upload and 5 MB/s download. Today I upgraded my network to 40 MB/s upload and 20 MB/s download, so I hope this will help. I would like to now if there actually is a limit of the upload capacity to iCloud, or if it actually blocks a lot of capacity while using just some percentage of this capacity for real upload...

  • by mayall,

    mayall mayall Aug 2, 2015 9:37 AM in response to Christopher P.
    Level 1 (25 points)
    Aug 2, 2015 9:37 AM in response to Christopher P.

    While possible, it seems unlikely that the modem is the issue. A couple observations:

     

    • The 100ms latency you see is really poor and a general problem. I think it is unrelated to the iCloud Upload problem.
    • Your observation that the problem seems to be associated with the Arris/Motorola modems is almost certainly because those are what Comcast (and probably others) rent. There are simply more of them out there and therefore more reports.

     

    Although I don’t have any specific evidence, I believe the problem is related to throttling that providers use to limit things like BitTorrent. The fact that simply reducing the upload speed via Network Link Conditioner instantly fixes the issue seems to point to ISP throttling being the cause.

     

    The puzzling part is why Photos iCloud upload triggers it whereas something like a Dropbox upload does not.

     

    Whatever the reason for the problem, it is remarkable that Apple released Photos apparently being unaware of the issue.

  • by Randpop,

    Randpop Randpop Aug 16, 2015 11:15 AM in response to mayall
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Aug 16, 2015 11:15 AM in response to mayall

    We experienced the same problem after the last update, but  with only one iMac in our office. After hours of inspecting the machines, the network switches, replacing cables and some discussions with our ISP I opened Wireshark and had a look what this computer was doing on the network connection. The result was seeing 2 processes related to iCloud sync opening a lot of connections to two Apple servers and sending so many packets over the network that there hardly was any room left for other processes which communicate with outside servers. This definitely has nothing to do with the bandwidth, the amount of data being  tranfered, the connection type or some narrow wires... it's simply a problem of this process which is flooding the connection with thousands of packets in short time. No wonder that this behaviour leads to unanswered requests.

     

    Needless to say, after disabling iCloud sync everything went back to normal. ;-)

first Previous Page 7 of 9 last Next