Massive data usage screen saver (Flickr/Photostream)

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Level 1

11 points

Massive data usage screen saver (Flickr/Photostream)

This is more a heads up than anything.

I have my Apple TV2 set up in my media center, mainly to airplay plex. I netflix every now and again, but nothing crazy.

My provider recently decided to actually enforce their data usage policies and they implemented usage cap warnings, where it was first basically a free for all. I am on a 300GB plan, and I freaked out when on day 10 I got my 50% warning. I stopped my downloads, I didn't watch any more netflix, but a few dats later I got my 75% warning, and the day after my 95% warning. I look back into my past usage, and I am burning through about 500GB per month, on my 300GB plan. I even have 156GB of traffic per month in the OFF hours! (2am-8am)

Something is downloading MASSIVE amounts of data. Did I get hacked? Unlikely, with WPA2 secured Airport extremes all over my house.

Sadly, airports can't run Tomato software or anything, so it was a bit of a challenge to find something to help me.

I came across PeakHour in the app store, that seems to be nicely configurable, so I can separate my outbound traffic a bit. Unfortunately, it won't separate per device easily. Anyway...

I've had it running for a while, when I noticed a constant 600KB/s down pull. Torrent? Nope. Netflix? Nope. I start turning off apps like dropbox and icloud that have up/down capabilities. But the network monitor on my iMac wasn't registering much of any traffic at all.

So I start turning off devices. Phones, iPads, laptops... **** I even unplugged my Nest. (yes, geek overload, let me be!)

Then I pull the cord on my apple TV, and my network usage just simply flatlines.

W

T

F

I plug it back in. Nothing. Nada. Probably a glitch.

5 minutes later, network gets hammered again.

What's changed? Then I see the screensaver. Linked to my Flickr account.

No. It can't be. But sure enough. I turn the screensaver off, network flatlines. I change it over to my Photostream, network spikes again.

The little blip before, is me watching a couple of youtube videos to test. The massive spike is the ATV running the Flickr screensaver. The dip at the end is where I switched from Flickr to the Photostream.

It seems that ATV2 does not buffer any of the photos, but simply streams them, constantly.

Apple TV (2nd generation)

Posted on May 16, 2014 12:15 PM

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Answer 1

diesel vdub

Level 7

22,184 points

May 16, 2014 1:49 PM in response to BasG

The ATV has no onboard storage, so any screensaver would be streamed unless using a folder on the computer to share files.

While it does seem a bit odd that so much data is being used, it has more to do with the quality of the pictures that are in the photostream (Flickr) being used as the screensaver.

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Answer 2

BasG Author

Level 1

11 points

May 16, 2014 2:05 PM in response to diesel vdub

While on a technical level that's understandable, you would expect there to be at least some mention of this fact somewere in the documentation. Obviously there will be some data usage with any streaming service, but this is absurd.

The flickr photos in my stream aren't gigantic. They're all resized to about 1200px, which would make them under an MB each.

This network pull is unreasonable.

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Answer 3

vazandrew

Level 8

40,834 points

May 16, 2014 8:51 PM in response to BasG

It is marketed as a streaming only device. Best to cache the pictures from your local library.

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Answer 4

Alley_Cat

Level 7

20,560 points

May 17, 2014 1:34 PM in response to BasG

I'd agree this data usage is ludicrous if it's the screensaver causing it.

Send feedback here:

https://www.apple.com/feedback/appletv.html

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Answer 5

BeeEss1

Level 1

0 points

May 28, 2014 7:33 PM in response to BasG

Hey, BasG:

You are *exactly* right. I discovered an identical problem last night. In my case, I had set my Apple TV 3 to never go to sleep - which means that it was running the screensaver 24/7 when it wasn't being used. The screensaver was set to display pictures from a favorite Flickr album.

Last weekend, I installed a new router/firewall which has the ability to monitor bandwidth per LAN interface. Imagine my surprise when I found out that my Apple TV had burned through 8GB of data in less than 24 hours... when we hadn't used it at all that day! A bit more sleuthing by passing it through a proxy, and lo and behold, the logs were saturated by requests from the Apple TV to flickr.com. It apparently: a) pulls down fairly high-resolution copies of photos from Flickr; and, b) never caches anything, so it just keeps doing that over and over and over. Here's the graph of the Apple TV's bandwidth usage from the period:

I disabled the screensaver, and the bandwidth usage dropped dead. Glad I figured it out, but the amount of data that can be consumed by what is essentially an ancillary feature is pretty astounding.

Cheers,

BeeEss

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