Comment by inguinalhernia | Hacker News Reader

Comment by inguinalhernia | Hacker News Reader

Wi-fi trouble in OS X 10.10.x is very hardware dependent, brand new MacBook Pro 2015 is just fine for example. But have heard so many users with nonstop wireless problems from 10.10, to 10.10.1, 10.10.2, 10.10.3, perhaps 10.10.4 as well, we'll find out soon enough.

The enormous ping post 10.10.3 update can also be from iCloud Photo Library from Photos app, which if you let it, attempts to upload every single picture from iPhoto and your Mac to iCloud, and download thumbnails from your iPhone / iPad to the Mac. This is frequently many GB, I have a 64GB iPhone for example, with 45GB of Photos. So, do you want that to upload from iPhone to iCloud and download thumbs to the Mac at the same time? No not really but thats what it tries to do, making the network very slow much like you describe. The send/recv network congestion from that alone will easily send your ping to 10 seconds.

It's hard to imagine such low quality software could be coming out of Apple lately. I hope they figure this out, maybe hire a larger Mac QA team if needed. And the OS X Public Beta program is kind of a joke, all bug reports go ignored. Not a single bug report I have filed has been addressed.

The ironic thing about all this is that the (largely) Apple mentality of hiding everything away makes it even more difficult to troubleshoot when something does go wrong, like this. Most users won't narrow down the problem so easily to their own machine if they only see the slowness described in the article... but what they will notice is a WiFi activity light that's blinking almost all the time, even when they aren't doing anything, when it used to not do that.

No idea why they didn't put these in Utilities but:

/System/Library/CoreServices/Applications

There is an application there called Wireless Diagnostics.

Option-click the wifi menubar item. "Open Wireless Diagnostics…" is an option there.

Every once in a while I'm troubleshooting why connection is slow again. With pings to google reaching 7-8 seconds. The offender was always an iOS device declaring itself king of the network. Finding the culprit is fun at times since some syncs stop once the device becomes active (e.g. iCloud backup, but not always).

Worst of all it's easy for redundant syncs to happen. "iCloud backup" on default config backs up the entire device, including your Camera Roll. "My Photo Stream" also uploads every picture as well as "iCloud Photo Library". This turns 5GB of pictures into 15GB. (Edit: wrong info see post below)

The most fun I've had a few days ago with "WhatsApp". They introduced their own backup capability via "iCloud Drive" which also doubles their backup requirements if not configured properly. Default iCloud backup already backs up all of WhatsApp. WhatsApp's iCloud Drive backup then saves everything again. In my case WhatsApp backup got stuck and was indefinitely uploading the same file. Turning backup off in WhatsApp-settings did nothing. I had to rip out iCloud Drive access for the app to make it stop.

This was on my sisters device. Given that WhatsApp is heavily used for image sharing as well this meant that WhatsApp was (trying to) backup 2*2GB of data. Not possible at 52KB/s upload speed.

Bonus points: WhatsApp also saves all images to the Camera Roll so the image gets backed up once more.

Fun times.

> Worst of all there are several redundant syncs possible. "iCloud backup" on default config backs up the entire device, including your Camera Roll. "My Photo Stream" also uploads every picture as well ass "iCloud Photo Library". This turns 5GB of pictures into 15GB.

That's a combination of misleading and outright false. What's misleading is you're suggesting that iCloud Backup and Photo Stream are doing redundant work. While it's true that both involve uploading your photos, Photo Stream only keeps the last 30 days (or 1000 photos), whereas iCloud Backup is a complete backup of everything. It must include your complete photo library, even the photos that are currently in Photo Stream, because there's no guarantee that the photos will still be available in Photo Stream when you decide to restore.

And what's completely wrong is your assertion that iCloud Photo Library is including redundant information yet again. This is wrong because if you enable iCloud Photo Library, then your iCloud Backup stops including the camera roll. If you have both iCloud Photo Library and Photo Stream enabled, I hope it only uploads the photo once, but I haven't done any measurements.

So no, this does not "turn 5GB of pictures into 15GB". It's not even 10GB (1000 photos is significantly less than 5GB).

Fair enough, that was me extrapolating from the experience I had so far. I didn't dream to turn on the new iCloud Photo Library so far to see that it'd turn off the iCloud backup part.

1000 Photos might not be 5GB but still every picture gets uploaded, just older ones disregarded once new ones arrive. Now if someone comes home after a day out with a 100 new pictures this puts some stress on your network once while it is updating photo stream (if not done over mobile data) and backing up.

Where some stress is: Complete congestion of the network since 100% of upload is used and at ~50KB/s speed around these parts it'll take forever to even sync 100 Pictures at 1.5-3MB each.

Your posting about iCloud uploading is rather misguided. First off, this only happens if you enable iCloud Photo Library, which is an explicit decision, not something that happens automatically. And secondly, it actually uploads fairly slowly (it certainly doesn't use all the available bandwidth) and has a fairly low per-day upload cap. If you have 45GB of photos (which strikes me as rather extreme for your phone) it will actually take a fairly long time to upload them all. I'm not sure what the daily cap actually is, but I think it's on the order of a few gigabytes.

Which is to say, uploading photos to iCloud Photo Library is something that should hardly even be noticeable, let alone something that would make your network unusable. I didn't do any measurements of the downloading process, but I saw absolutely no network disruption during the download process either when I switched over to iCloud Photo Library.

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