iCloud Photo Library upload killing internet connection

I'd like to put to bed the notion that this issue is (for most people here) an internet speed issue. We are all well aware that uploads will take a while. So far I've pushed up about 300GB into my iCloud Photos library. I've anticipated the internet slowness that will come with it. I'm quite knowledgeable in this field, as I'm working with networks day in and day out.

The symptom that I am seeing is nearly identical to other users here, and I've been troubleshooting it for days thinking that my cable modem just was going out, though it's a fairly new SB6120. I'm curious if the others that are running into this issue are using the same model modem. What seems to happen is one of 2 things:

1. Cable modem stops passing traffic to ISP gateway. In this state I can reset the modem by using it's web interface and rebooting the modem.

2. Cable modem stops answering all requests. Wont respond to ping, will no longer respond to web requests for its status page (http://192.168.100.1). In this state, I need to physically power cycle the modem for it to return to a functional state.

This has never happened previous to the iCloud photo library upload. I have a WatchGuard firewall in place, that I initially suspected was somehow blocking the traffic due to its advanced scanning and blocking features, but I've disabled nearly everything in this troubleshooting process to no avail.

All the lights on the modem remain on in a normal state of operation, so the cable modem itself believes it's still online. My guess would be that there's something with the packets that's locking up the cable-ethernet bridge in the modem, though the logs in the modem don't seem to be reporting anything out of the ordinary (which usually only logs the cable/WAN side anyway from my experience). This issue may completely be in the modem, but just triggered by something Apple is doing in their upload. Or it may have something to do with the ISP's system possibly blocking suspicious traffic.

Could you report on your model modem? I'd like to see if this is possibly isolated to a single model modem.

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.

If your library is only 50MB it should take a couple of minutes, but I assume you meant 50GB

Test your actual upload speed (internet provider claims are marketing, not always fact) test it on this site speedof.me

I Have a SB6121

Motorola SB6121

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.

How long "should" it take?

gjlamb wrote:

Something is definitely wrong and even though my upload speed is only 1000Mbps,

Your upload speed is not 1000Mb/s, it's not even 100Mb/s measure it, your guesses are so far out you will be very disappointed

Measure your upload speed (at this site) it's better than guessing.

Thanks!

Mototola - Arris SB6141

I should have said my library is 50 GB, NOT 50 MB!

You are correct. I meant 50 GB.

I have tested my upload (and download) speed both with and without the Photos upload running. When it's not running, I get 18 Mbps down and 600-800 kbps up, which is close to the advertise 20/1 Mbps. When it is running, I get 3-5 Mbps down and 140 kbps up.

In other words, the upload kills both directions of my internet connection. From what the knowledgeable network gurus are saying on this thread, I conjecture there's a bug in icloudd, the iCloud daemon.

That's just a guess. I imagine there may some other explanation.

Kimhelliwell, I believe your problem is different than others. You have 1 megabit uplink. Naturally, you only will saturate that to 80% because of overhead traffic. 1 megabit equals roughly 128 Kilobytes/sec or .1 megabytes per sec. This equals a 15MB average picture uploading in about 2 minutes. This is considered pretty low these days (5-10 is about average), and will cause you issues with "cloud" services, since you do need to get that data up to the cloud first. At best, it would take about 5 days at 100% saturation to get your library up to the cloud.

Now about upload and download. To download (or really to do) anything, you need to send a request for said action first. If your upload is saturated, that request has to get in line (queue) with your other outgoing requests (your pictures). The time to wait to send that request is counted against you in your speed test, because the test doesn't know any better.. it's just running a timer, an then dividing the size of the file by the amount of time. In short: a saturated upstream will affect your perceived downstream, and this is completely normal. We have ways to manage and negate this in the world of networking, but home networks just aren't going to be managed well. What iCloud photos uploader could do is allow you to monitor and cap upload a little better, but as far as getting it up to the cloud faster, you're bottlenecked by your ISP here.

You're going to see the most improvement by bumping your internet speed at least temporarily while your initial upload is going.

It's just gonna happen until your library finishes its upload.

Arris TG862 -- my modem - Connected to an Apple Airport Extreme (lastest AC model). Mac is Ethernet attached directly to the Apple Airport Extreme.

Tim:

Thanks for that explanation. Given what you say, and given my sudden realization that network speeds are in bits/second while the Activity Monitor is giving uploads in Bytes/sec, it appears I'm getting all the speed I ever will achieve with my current connection. Your explanation of why the download speed is affected also makes perfect sense.

Unfortunately, I live in Idaho and my connection is from CenturyLink (formerly Qwest), and there is no higher speed tier available to me at this time. So I guess I will have to live with what I have at the moment. Fortunately, I think in a week or two all the pix will be uploaded and life can get back to normal.

And it appears I do not have a problem with my connection or with the software. So I guess I'll just tiptoe out of here and be happy my network isn't being killed, just slammed, by the upload process.

BTW: even when I lived in San Jose, CA I doubt I had upload speeds greater than I have here. In fact, my download speed here is faster than I had there, if I'm remembering correctly. In spite of being the "Capital of Silicon Valley", available speeds there lagged sadly behind much of the rest of the country. As of 2 years ago, anyway.

I have an Arris CM820A. Router is an Airport Extreme (4th Generation).