iCloud Photo Library upload killing internet connection

anders kristian wrote:

Gentlemen

Please stay on the subject.

Who put you in charge?

Don't tell me what to post, especially with your rather limited viepoint

My modem is a NETGEAR genie CG3700EMR firmware V2.01.03

I too have experienced the utter and complete death of my internet connection while Photos is syncing with iCloud. I've got TWC internet service with a 2.0 Mbps upload on an ARRIS / Motorola SB6121 cable modem.

And to compare: I backed up a couple terabytes of data when I started using the CrashPlan online backup plan last year, and never experienced any degradation of my connection while the backup was running. With the Photos sync, however, the connection on my iMac becomes unusable, streaming through my Apple TV becomes unusable, basically any device on the local network becomes unusable until I pause the iCloud sync.

anders kristian wrote:

Gentlemen

Please stay on the subject.

We are others that have had the exact same problem. My Modem also stopped responding.

In my case I took my computer to work and did most of the upload from here...

So I did not end up rebooting my modem more than once.

Please again....

There is a clue in your answer - in taking your computer to work and using the companies connection - you used a conditioned - no fault setup - probably using a top speed connection - so that means your home connection may have a fault in it especially the underground wiring ones where the wire is old.

Tim Bloom1 wrote:

The funny thing about bugs is that they will rarely manifest themselves on the majority of configurations. Otherwise they'd, hopefully, never made it out of beta testing. Usually only bugs that affect a small fraction of the user base make it past that point, but are then discovered in the 1.0 phase. Which is likely what we see here. This is not a major fault of apple's, it's something inherant in all software development. And this is generally how it goes. 1.0 anything is pretty much lovingly called public beta 2.0 for this reason. Apple obviously knew all about this, hence their reasoning for such a lengthy beta program, to reduce the prevalence of these.

Actually something like this happened with the ITUNES 11.something roll out - Pod Cast updates were causing problems during download - and it apparently had to do with the number of podcasts being updated (I don't do podcasts). A person in Japan worked with Apple Support to determine the problem after setting up a support call and mentioning that thread.

At this point - someone on this thread who has the problem should set up a support call and give apple this thread number so that they can review the posts before calling them.

In giving feedback - list your connection type, your carrier, your modem model, and the size of your PHOTOS library.

notcloudy wrote:

In giving feedback - list your connection type, your carrier, your modem model, and the size of your PHOTOS library.

Without the upload bandwidth it will be hard to calculate the upload duration. I believe that low bandwidth (and unrealistic expectations) are at the heart of this, not previously unknown defects in hardware.

I'm really unsure how to put this in simpler terms. Maxing your upload WILL NOT lock up your cable-ethernet bridge in your modem. A few people here were just having issues that were speed related but that's not the core issue we are fighting here. This is that modems need to actually be totally reset to pass ANY traffic. A properly functioning modem will still pass traffic at 100% utilization (packets will queue, but will eventually get through) obviously, as it can't stay at 100% utilization if no traffic is passing. Again, there are people here that have posted "omg this is taking forever, something is broken!" but that's not the actually issue of OP, nor is it mine.

Tim Bloom1 wrote:

I'm really unsure how to put this in simpler terms. Maxing your upload WILL NOT lock up your cable-ethernet bridge in your modem.

As I never said it would I have no idea why you addressed this to me, for the record I still think that this is a combination of unrealistic expectations, poor observation and mediocre to dreadful internet connections. 165GB at 180Kb/s, time enough for a world cruise.

The heart of this thread is cable modems locking up from the iCloud Photos uploader. Not slow speed during uploads. I have 150Mbps/20Mbps service, and regularly max it out with Crashplan and other cloud services. I wish people would be leaving bandwidth issues out of this thread, since it's not really the discussion.

Over the last week I've pushed up around 400GB of a 600GB library, I'm impressed with their ability to handle that kind of incoming traffic well, but that's also not the purpose of the thread. It's locking up the cable modem.

I work with many clients, with worse connections than this, and we usually will do their offsite backups over cable modem. Being small/medium businesses, they usually run their internet on the cheapest tier they can get by on, so often times 1/10th of what I'm using here and with the same model modem all around town. When doing the initial push of their backups we are almost always saturating the modem in this same manner for weeks on end until we get the initial push completed, and then smooth sailing from then on with just deltas nightly. This doesn't have the same behavior whatsoever. Nobody's cable modem locks up from that.

Could we put the speed thing to bed, and let that happen in another thread?

You are welcome to post as you wish, however you are not at all welcome to decide what I post.

I fully agree. This case has very little to do with modem speed.

I have also uploaded Gigabyte to other services without having the modem to hang-up.

The subject is: iCloud Photo Library upload killing internet connection

So lets stay to that. And people are can have other threads where calculation of upload time etc. can come to debate.

Yes hopefully we can get back on track and try and resolve the issue.....I don't mind having to wait for the upload to happen but it's annoying that everything else grounds to a standstill and I have to reboot the modem to get everything flowing again.

For another data point:

When I try to upload anything to iCloud (Photos or files to my iCloud Drive) it kills my entire internet connection.

You are right, it is NOT about the speed at which things upload to iCloud; it is about the fact that uploading to iCloud kills the connection.

I had my cable provider out to look at it. Everything is fine from their end. I can upload and download with other sites/services. It really is isolated to iCloud. I get the same issue, downloads are slowed WAY down while I am uploading and go back to normal when I pause the download. If I let it upload long enough then it usually completely kills the connection and I have to do a hard reset of my modem.

Very odd; I hope Apple is fixing this but I have never heard of an issue like this.

To all

After the usual back door entry into Apple support system the following sites may help you out as it certainly clarified Icloud and photo for me.

iphoto getting started

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204655

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204410

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204264

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204414

If I were to use PHOTO and the ICLOUD which I am not - my designated system photo library ( the one that synchronizes across devices) would contain only current pictures synchronized from other devices and I would move them out of that library to a other ones rather than keep them in the ICLOUD.

In the development of PHOTOS and the ICLOUD it looks like that is what Apple was aiming at - - as they also tell you to back up your photos on your own devices.

Biggest issue I have with Apple is that it is a struggle to get detailed instructions on their software.

Oh and for those having trouble converting there are instructions on how to do it in pieces.

I have similar connection speeds as Tim (150MbDown/25MbUp), and the iCloud Photo Library does cause my Motorola SB modem to hang. I seem to recall having similar problems with syncing photo streams in Aperture.

This is a hard problem to pin down unless one has a good understanding of what's going on at the cable modem. Logs are very limited on the cable modem, and gathering information via SNMP is disabled by my provider. I do use a cloud base backup solution, and have managed to backup several TB of data without ever having the cable modem lockup. Granted the backup software works differently than Photos/iCloud, and supports throttling/QOS. Anyway, it would be nice to be able to tweak upload speed settings for iCloud. Maybe it's time to fire up Wireshark, and see what's going on network wise. I don't see any FIOS users complaining, so my guess is the problem is with the cable modem and it's interactions with iCloud.