iCloud Photo Library upload killing internet connection

Mack Palm Springs wrote:

For this problem:

In iCloud preferences, I delay the upload for one day - then my internet connectivity and application responsiveness resumes. No problem. When the Photo upload resumes the next day - Internet performance goes to near zero. This has been repeatable from the upgrade to 10.10.3 on both my iMac and my MacBook Pro (with other family ids).

Your suggestions are good, but in this case - it is iCloud and Photo - not the other devices or other software.

I have now turned off iCloud for Photos and reduced my storage plan.

With ICLOUD uploads you are going against the regular flow of internet data which is geared towards high-speed downloads - and with PHOTOS it seems you are trying to upload an rather large library. Stopping all automatic internet downloads and other traffic will help reduces the traffic load.

You may have to ask your internet provider about upload speeds - and how to increase them -- make sure you talk to their tech expert - or if they have a web site check that for speeds.

Also give apple feedback using option if it exists in Icloud or Photos

or at http://www.apple.com/feedback/

I had the same experience

I started iCloud upload in the evening

The morning after my cable modem was not responding

It was first after work the day after I tried to power off - power on my cable modem.

Then everything worked again...

I have not tried a situation like this before. My cable modem normally works for years without failure.

I find it very difficult to understand that Apple should be able to make software that "kills" my cable modem - by overloading it in some way.

In my eyes it should just slow down.

But I had the same experience.

Maybe Apple should add some option for "wait" between uploading data ....

Root cause must be found before changing anything 😁

anders kristian wrote:

I had the same experience

I started iCloud upload in the evening

The morning after my cable modem was not responding

It was first after work the day after I tried to power off - power on my cable modem.

Then everything worked again...

I find it very difficult to understand that Apple should be able to make software that "kills" my cable modem - by overloading it in some way.

😁

Call your Cable provider and find out what the upload speed is -- notice it is not being advertised in all the annoying cable commercials - they only give you down load speeds - see if you can increase it - of course ask how much it will cost you.

Never leave a long transmission running while you sleep - if the line has a hiccup, or the server is taken off line for housekeeping - it is done around midnight - your device will get stuck in a never-ending loop - waiting for a response that never comes because the connection was broken.

Your system may also have fallen Asleep during the process - so the drive may not have powered up in time.

After using the Apple Support search magnifying glass to bring up the search of their support (to the right of the word SEARCH) above searching for UPLOAD SPEED ICLOUD -- received a page full of hits including this support site for Photos https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204264

It was updated this month.

Based on the size of libraries those who are having upload problems have -- Apple engineers may not have anticipated someone having that many photos they want in the ICLOUD.

I have a hard time understanding why Apple engineers would not anticipate the size of libraries that people would want to upload when they are selling up to 1 TB of space. I only have the 200 MB tier, and I'm uploading a library that's only about 50 MB, and it's taking DAYS to upload, and meanwhile killing my download speed as well. The Network tab of the Activity Monitor on my Mac is reporting the upload speed to be about 130-150 kbps, which is a fraction of the upload speed my ISP guarantees (about 1/6 of so).

I have been talking with my provider, who said they could see I was not getting the targeted 864 kbps upload speed I was entitled to, and they sent out a tech to look into it. His diagnosis was that the wiring to the jack I was using was faulty, and he rewired it and got things working correctly. After that, my upload speed for the photos went from 80-100 kbps to the above stated 130-150 kbps. So the upload speeded up by about 40%, but not to the level it could and should be at.

And that concerns me. Either there is a systematic bug in the code (icloudd) that does the upload, or Apple is throttling upload speeds to a fraction of the available bandwidth to preserve their servers from overload.

Whatever the case, I hope that Apple will come clean on this and come up with a fix.

Painful, my internet dies if Photos uploads and even if I visit icloud.com to view photos. As soon as I close iCloud.com(from Browser) and/or pause uploading in Photos, I power cycle my modem and my internet comes back.

I am gonna have to cancel this thing until they fix it.

I'm having the same issues here. When I have Photos set to upload my library to iCloud it severely impacts my internet and the ability to load webpages etc. across all my machines. I only have 3K pics in the library and I've been trying to upload it at night and pause it during the day but its only half done so far.

Today I manually dropped a folder with 500 pics (2GB) into my iCloud Drive and it began to upload with the same results. My internet download and webpage loads were terrible. I couldn't even get to speedtest.net to see how bad it was. I left it for a few hours and once that upload completed everything returned to normal again. I then took the same 2GB folder with 500 pics and put it in my OneDrive folder and it began syncing but to my surprise everything kept working normally. Webpage loads and speed tests etc are all normal. I only seem to have issues with iCloud.

My internet is 50Mbps down and 3Mbps up. I can deal with the uploads to iCloud being slow because I'm sure they are getting slammed with picture uploads since 10.10.3 came out but that doesn't explain why its killing my entire internet connection.

kimhelliwell wrote:

I have a hard time understanding why Apple engineers would not anticipate the size of libraries that people would want to upload when they are selling up to 1 TB of space. I only have the 200 MB tier, and I'm uploading a library that's only about 50 MB, and it's taking DAYS to upload, and meanwhile killing my download speed as well. The Network tab of the Activity Monitor on my Mac is reporting the upload speed to be about 130-150 kbps, which is a fraction of the upload speed my ISP guarantees (about 1/6 of so).

I have been talking with my provider, who said they could see I was not getting the targeted 864 kbps upload speed I was entitled to, and they sent out a tech to look into it. His diagnosis was that the wiring to the jack I was using was faulty, and he rewired it and got things working correctly. After that, my upload speed for the photos went from 80-100 kbps to the above stated 130-150 kbps. So the upload speeded up by about 40%, but not to the level it could and should be at.

And that concerns me. Either there is a systematic bug in the code (icloudd) that does the upload, or Apple is throttling upload speeds to a fraction of the available bandwidth to preserve their servers from overload.

Whatever the case, I hope that Apple will come clean on this and come up with a fix.

Have you every done multiple downloads at the same time with the download window open? As you add them, the ones that are running start to show longer and longer estimated times - because they are sharing the same inbound road to the same destination.

On uploads you are going to a destination with other peoples uploads - so stands to reason - many people uploading to the same destination would slow processing down as each of you have your data written to the drives.

Distance can play a part in problems in transmission - if apple tested uploads only within silicon valley -- with only small number of pictures - to a server in silicon valley - then the speeds they saw did not represent what users would get in the real world.

Same issue. Never had this problem before switching over to Photos from iPhoto.

Theres definitely something wrong with this process. If I have only the one computer doing the Photos upload, it still takes longer than it should. I have a 5500 photo library plus videos to upload. So far over the week I've barely got 1000 photos uploaded. I ran another test this morning and resumed the upload and went out for the day. I was out 5 hours and the count only went down by 1 photo. Something is definitely wrong and even though my upload speed is only 1000Mbps, I should have been able to upload more than 1 photo in 5 hours!!

gjlamb wrote:

Theres definitely something wrong with this process. If I have only the one computer doing the Photos upload, it still takes longer than it should. I have a 5500 photo library plus videos to upload. So far over the week I've barely got 1000 photos uploaded. I ran another test this morning and resumed the upload and went out for the day. I was out 5 hours and the count only went down by 1 photo. Something is definitely wrong and even though my upload speed is only 1000Mbps, I should have been able to upload more than 1 photo in 5 hours!!

It means you had a line problem immediately -- I have had downloads from apple update get stuck like that in a bit of a never ending loop where if caught in time all I had to do was pause it disconnect and try later -- if it actually did throw an error -usually cannot write this to disk - if the line was still up - could go back into the download - it would pick up where it left off usually a some place before it started.

If you are in an area where cable/telephone/electric company are replacing telephone poles and moving wiring over - that can cause hiccups.

During a long (for me) download I check it about every 1/2 hour and move that window around on the scree (that restarts the clock on putting your monitor to sleep)

If you know where your data is going to - or coming from its easy to check to see what mother nature if up to -- if you don't it can be frustrating.

Give Apple feedback at http://www.apple.com/feedback/

In that case include your location so they may trace what is happening.

Lets all provide feedback and hopefully Apple will fix the problem

The more of us the more the chances:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/

To Not Cloudy:

I know you are trying to help - and Thank you. But in this you are wrong. There are too many people with this problem. I support about a dozen friends and family - across the country. Different ISPs, different plans. The problem is WIDESPREAD - not isolated. (As an IT professional with 4 decades of experience and 3 decades in TCP/IP and a Mac since Macintosh 1984 - I believe this is a protocol issue of some sort. Some "deadly embrace" in the download. But this speculation on my part. It is what I see from Little Snitch and iStats telling me who is using the network during the download attempts.)

I will tell anyone to AVOID Photos on iCloud until I see (on this post or some new show) that this is fixed.

Good idea . I posted my plea to Apple just now.