Why are My iTunes Downloads so Slow?

"Apple Techs" if with that you mean computer technicians and software developers working for Apple doesn't typically read our posts here. Griff1324 that you replied too is a user just like we're all users as is you. In some cases we're Mac support people from outside of Apple — working for other companies — with no special voice in where Apple development is focused.

If you want Apples ear you could do bug reports, call Apple for support (paid or if you're eligible free) or go to an Apple store and consult the genius desk.

What you describe in my experience typically means your machine is too weak, have too little RAM for what you ask from it and/or have too many background application running when you use iTunes.

I wouldn't say your issue is typical iTunes behavior, but I do think iTunes is too slow sometimes. I never see the beach ball (that "spinning thing") however and my machine is very old.

Anyway, this thread isn't about the speed of the iTunes application, but about iTunes download speed, so no need to respond further here. Instead start a new thread about your issue.

Its Works........ Thanks

But Not So Much

I Got Increased Speed from 1 MB/S to 5-6 Mb/s on as I have a 100 Mb/s network Speed..

Yet its much better than 1 mb/s.

I don't know why any of you are attempting to defend apple or blame the issue on anyone other then apple its 100% on them I just downloaded a 100mb iTunes update in less then 30 seconds but I've been downloading an item I bought from the iTunes store of roughly the same size and its on hour 5 and only 60% done. They have the bandwith and resources to accommodate us but once they have you're money then there is no need for them to put any more resources into that item because they know you will download it no matter how long it takes cause you already purchased it.

OMG MAN THANKS SO MUCH>..

this worked for me...
I dont even know what a DNS is but i was trying to download ios8

and this worked for me man thanks!!!!

Is apple ever gonna fix this.

are they to blame.?

I was having a terrible time getting anything from Apple of late. Changed my DNS settings on my router to use Google DNS...

8.8.8.8

8.8.4.4

Instead of 40+ hours to update my iPad Air to IOS 8, it did it in 7 minutes. Everything else coming from Apple is blazing fast now!

BTW, I have 75/75 internet with Verizon FIOS.

So here's another odd data point.

I've had to do a couple of IOS 8 restores this week, and during them (Windows) iTunes decided to download the entire 8.0.2 image. The average download speed was 100 Mbps! This is *several* times faster than when (Windows) iTunes is downloading apps or movies. And my hard drive was no longer thrashing - utilization was under 20% versus the 90% plus when downloading apps or movies.

So apparently iTunes can download IOS like a bat out of **** - but not apps or movies!!

I changed my DNS to Google as first and OpenDNS as second then restarted my network connection - went from 100kb/s to 3Mb/s - 3 hour estimated download time reduced to 4 minutes!! Thank you very much for your comment!

I like many people here had the issue of slow downloads due to bad DNS settings. In my case it was much more frustrating, as I'd learned about openDNS a while ago and had installed a proxy caching server (which defaulted to openDNS, in their docs and installation I was made aware of this). So here I thought, shoot! Simple fix, change the DNS in my network settings so connect to the best one around. So I disabled my proxy, re-enabled my desktop for automatic search, but to no avail. Thinking rats maybe there's some other issue with my computer, I kept digging and digging.

However I got curious, what DNS exactly did my computer pick when I left it run wild as opposed to the proxy? My internet speeds were virtually untouched switching from my openDNS proxy to window's automatic selection and that just seemed weird. Suprise suprise after cracking open cmd and using ipconfig /all I found that instead of hooking up to openDNS, my computer determined that 8.8.4.4 was the best DNS. In short the settings jumped from one bad example to use with iTunes (openDNS) to another bad example (google's DNS).

If you have any reason to suspect that something is in fact up with your DNS, because for whatever reason your internet connections are fast, but iTunes is ungodly slow here what I found to be the best tool to hook up your computer to a DNS likely suited for you. https://code.google.com/p/namebench/

Be aware the testing process will take a while, just leave it be, when it's done it will open up your internet browser with some stats, the important part though are the two ip addresses in the top corner, they described the closest and fastest DNS servers near you, use those in your ip v4 settings, done 🙂 see if you don't get results.

Have a good day all.

For reference my download speeds before I figured this out: ~0.2 mbs, after? Actually I'm not sure I wasn't paying attention after I got results but it managed to download a 1.52gb video in about 12 minutes, you're free to do the math, I'm just happy.

It would seem that I'm missing the relevance of the info you supply here — though it's generally very useful if you want to evaluate your DNS settings— as the issue causing slow iTunes downloads doesn't concern DNS response time as much as the consulted DNS influence on the physical location of the media server from which iTunes media is downloaded.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you imply here, because a 500ms difference in DNS response time wouldn't directly affect download speed in itself. Once my machine have consulted a Domain Name Server it caches the IP. My machine won't ask again unless the cache is flushed or deleted. But perhaps this wasn't what you meant?

Is it perhaps that the "near you" factor you mention affect also affect the physical server selected by Apple-associated delivery networks to be more near than when using a DNS further away from where you are?

I wonder, though. Given this report, it seems like Google & OpenDNS are working with Akmai regarding location issues. I wonder if blaming that is really an issue anymore.

http://betanews.com/2014/12/15/google-collaborates-with-akamai-to-improve-public -dns-offering/

https://gigaom.com/2014/06/03/akamai-signs-deal-with-opendns-to-make-the-web-fas ter/

I was having this problem, and changed from Google Public DNS back to my ISP's. Made no difference. Same sluggish performance. Which doesn't surprise me as I was getting fast downloads from Apple using Google DNS before the last few days (around Feb 13th or so I started noticing a problem).

This seems to be happening to not just Apple but other services as well. Everything from Apple, to Amazon, to Microsoft, to NetFlix, and everything in between. This shouldn't be happening. All of these companies should have the resources to be able to fill the pipe of any average home user's Internet connection. They all should have more bandwidth than God!

Then again, it could be because our ISPs are, like Verizon, letting their peering points over-saturate and thus we have this issue.

What is the point of this page if its just everyone saying yeah, I have the same phuquing problem ???

I'm sure this has nothing to do with DNS or anything related to your own internet connection. I can imagine downloads being slow when a new update for iOS is released and everyone is downloading it at the same time. But now i'm restoring an older iPhone to factory settings and it first downloads the latest iOS for that model. The update is 1.13 GB and it takes about half an our to download on a 100/100 fiber connection.. I would not be surprised if this is by design and they are limiting download speeds from their datacenters...

In a purely unscientific test, but working off the suggestions in this thread, I changed my router's DNS settings from those supplied by the ISP to Google's and I've been able to update a couple of dozen apps in a few minutes that iTunes was saying would each take hours. Several resets of the router and DNS cache flushes earlier in the day hadn't had any effect.

tt2

how about 2 hours for a 46 minute album with 250 mb/s ?