iCloud Photo Library (and the whole Drive) slow beyond unusable
iCloud Photo Library (and the whole iCloud Drive experience) is so slow, it's beyond unusable.
I fully understand the iCloud Photo Library is still in Beta phase. I also understand that during my Apple devices usage over the years I have accumulated about 4000 images and thus the process takes a little bit longer. There might have also been some migration issues with my account behind the scenes over the years which makes it a bit more complicated than the case with just a fresh new iCloud account on a new device.
However, all taken into account, my iCloud experience (and not just with the Photo Library) is really a far cry from Apple events presentations. Every step involving upload and download to/from iCloud is so unbelievably slow (I'm not talking seconds or minutes but sometimes hours) it's almost unusable as a documents storage, let alone for serious work use.
First of all the setup:
- I have iPhone 5S, iPad Air and late 2013 MacBook Pro, all using the same iCloud account. Latest iOS (now 8.1) and Yosemite.
- I have broadband internet connection via fibre optic with 25Mbit bandwidth without any connectivity issues (regularly tested)
- My home WiFi is running on 802.11ac with capabilities well exceeding the maximums of all the devices, all on the same SSID, working like a clockwork, no issues
Now, the problems:
- I have enabled iCloud Photo Library on both iPhone and iPad. The whole process of migrating Photos into iCloud took best part of 3 days (!?) to finish to a state when I can say it's all more or less synchronised between devices. During the whole time both devices had the whole bandwidth available. When I was monitoring the traffic on the router, both devices were hardly using any for most of the time. Apple Services Status website showed all services as green. Sometimes it went completely dead for hours, the only action that seemed to resume anything happening was turning the WiFi off and on again, the device restart, sometimes only reset. Why are not the files synchronised immediately and continuously?
- After the library was finally synchronised, I've tried to take a new picture on the iPhone and wait for it to appear on iPad for further edits. Only once it was a remotely quick action (about a minute), most of the time this simple task took good part of an hour, sometimes more. With regards to the data amount transferred, this should be a few seconds job at the most, I have absolutely no idea why it could be taking so long. There's been nothing else using the bandwidth on the devices itself or my broadband connection (all monitored per device and per services directly on the router). Both devices were simply not transferring any data to or from iCloud, despite connected to an idle connection, anything using internet on them was perfectly fine, internet SpeedTest was also showing full bandwidth available.
- The same problems occur when using iWorks for creating and editing documents. Considering the miniature size of the files, the action should be instant, yet again, it seems to be completely stuck, sometimes requiring the restart or a reset of the device to resume working properly.
I have tried everything, including removing my Apple ID from the devices and then adding it again, when I've noticed these problems for the first time with iWorks. Nothing seems to help.
Any ideas what might be wrong? Anyone having the same experience?
