iCloud Photo Library upload killing internet connection

There are instructions and the link on this page:

https://mayallit.wordpress.com/2015/04/23/how-to-fix-apple-photos-icloud-photo-l ibrary-upload-using-network-link-conditioner/

Wow quite a busy forum. Thanks for posting the issue, which I also experience. When the MacBookPro does its uploading to the cloud in the background the internet speed for the entire household will get so sluggish that it's essentially unusable. Yes, we only have a somewhat slow ADSL line - but normal upload and download processes seem to happily coincide and share the line -- until the MacBookPro does its thing. What is frustrating is that the typical Apple user will have absolutely no idea of what is happening - yet his or her computer is the bully in the home: all other internet traffic gets slowed to a crawl. So the novice will think "the internet service provider" is at fault, "need faster connection". No, what is needed a more considerate programming style, taking into account the notion that not everybody has fiber optic cable connections that speedily upload large amounts of photos.

The best way to work around this is to turn the cloud off.

The second best is to throttle the offender, kind of like putting shackles on the bully so that the bully can't continue to kick others off the playground. The program to help is Network Link Conditioner. Description at https://mayallit.wordpress.com/2015/04/23/how-to-fix-apple-photos-icloud-photo-l ibrary-upload-using-network-link-conditi…

Try to get installed at your next One-to-One 😁

Good luck!

The search function doesn't seem to be working on the developers site, and I can't locate the NLC download. Is there another place to find it?

https://www.dropbox.com/s/14by1qk99j1vcba/Hardware_IO_Tools_for_Xcode_7_beta.dmg ?dl=0

I was having the same issue, the upload was completely killing my network. Internet was practically disabled.

I've decided to investigate more and it seems like it's a WiFi issue, not the modem/bandwidth issue.

I use an Airport Extreme and a Motorola SB6141 (Texas Instruments chip) modem.

When I disable WiFi and use an Ethernet cable directly to my MacBook Air, internet is completely usable and fast even without using Network Line Conditioner. I am now uploading at full speed via an Ethernet cable end everything is rock solid, fast and stable.

On a WiFi, things seem to improve a lot when I force-use the 5Ghz. If you have the ability to choose between a 5Ghz and 2.4Ghz WiFi network, you can try to connect to the 5Ghz and make your device(s) forget the 2.4Ghz one, at least temporarily until you complete the iCloud Photo upload.

For reference, I live in a tiny house with many WiFi devices all close to the router, but I'm not sure if it matters.

(As others noted, Dropbox does not have this issue.)

But is the problem only related to upload from Mac? What about iPhone and iPad uploading to Photos or iCloud in general? Is the network line conditioner available also for those devices?

Actually, I have had problems with my broadband telephony probably caused by iCloud syncing. I could hear the voice of those I spoke with, but the other one could only hear me partly. I think the problems started in May or something when I started using Photos and iCloud Photo Library instead of Photostream.

My speed has been 30 MB/s upload and 5 MB/s download. Today I upgraded my network to 40 MB/s upload and 20 MB/s download, so I hope this will help. I would like to now if there actually is a limit of the upload capacity to iCloud, or if it actually blocks a lot of capacity while using just some percentage of this capacity for real upload...

While possible, it seems unlikely that the modem is the issue. A couple observations:

• The 100ms latency you see is really poor and a general problem. I think it is unrelated to the iCloud Upload problem.
• Your observation that the problem seems to be associated with the Arris/Motorola modems is almost certainly because those are what Comcast (and probably others) rent. There are simply more of them out there and therefore more reports.

Although I don’t have any specific evidence, I believe the problem is related to throttling that providers use to limit things like BitTorrent. The fact that simply reducing the upload speed via Network Link Conditioner instantly fixes the issue seems to point to ISP throttling being the cause.

The puzzling part is why Photos iCloud upload triggers it whereas something like a Dropbox upload does not.

Whatever the reason for the problem, it is remarkable that Apple released Photos apparently being unaware of the issue.

We experienced the same problem after the last update, but with only one iMac in our office. After hours of inspecting the machines, the network switches, replacing cables and some discussions with our ISP I opened Wireshark and had a look what this computer was doing on the network connection. The result was seeing 2 processes related to iCloud sync opening a lot of connections to two Apple servers and sending so many packets over the network that there hardly was any room left for other processes which communicate with outside servers. This definitely has nothing to do with the bandwidth, the amount of data being tranfered, the connection type or some narrow wires... it's simply a problem of this process which is flooding the connection with thousands of packets in short time. No wonder that this behaviour leads to unanswered requests.

Needless to say, after disabling iCloud sync everything went back to normal. ;-)

I'm new to this discussion as I just got a new camera with higher resolution whose photos are affecting net traffic more than my old camera's photos.

I just looked into my router's settings and given the information I can glean about the iCloud traffic, I don't see a way to discriminately throttle it.

I checked out the solutions suggested but I don't see how they can help; if anything, using Network Link Conditioner will make things worse because it will throttle all traffic, including HTTP requests (which is why my internet connection seems so slow when iCloud sync is happening) and will have to go on for longer as it will take longer for the sync to complete.

My network monitor identified five separate servers in use by iCloud so even if a router could throttle by server, it might involve a lot of shooting in the dark.

iCloud uses Xsan, so anything pointing to TCP port range 49152-65535 should/could be throttled, in case you are having this upload problem.

TCP and UDP ports used by Apple software products - Apple Support

Photos uploading is painfully slow. DropBox uploads the same photos is less than 1/4 of the time and seems to do it without freezes my internet connection. iCloud is still going through some painful growth and development. I don't trust it yet as there seem to be some sync issues on select items. I am still using Drop Box as my primary. Would be nice to use iCloud because of its integration but until its reliable, its just a backup.

Hi Anders,

Yes, you're absolutely right: Apple SHOULD have included a "Wait" or "Don't disrupt system performance" feature with iCloud. Not just in the Apple apps, but for iCloud Drive, which is marketed for all file types. If there is such a feature, I haven't found it nor have many others.

Failing to provide bandwidth-management capability is a huge, gaping hole when marketing a feature for 200GB-1TB datasets in consumer environments. Great concept, but shame on the product manager for either:

a) failing to anticipate this, or

b) anticipating this, but launching anyway.

Another good example of the downsides of being a leading-edge consumer. I may well cancel my extra capacity. Reminds me of the old Dutch saying:

"A barber learns to shave by shaving fools".

Get a router with QoS.

The same thing is happening over here. I would like to add that I've tried an Apple Airport Express, Apple Airport Extreme and Google's new OnHub. They all fail. In Google's case my app could not connect to the router and so it said the internet was down. When I inspected the device it was teal indicating normal. (I only mention OnHub because it's the only evidence I have)

I have 100mbps down and 10mbps up and iCloud and a 50GB library toasted my connection for hours. Other similar services like OneDrive do have give me similar headaches.