Holy slow Match servers!

[mcdj]

I'm downloading 7500 tracks (50GB) from iTunes Match. I started yesterday at 9am. After 24 hours, I still have 5800 left. That's 1700 tracks in 24 hours or 70/hour. At an average size of 7mb per song, that's just under 1gb/hour, and yet I haven't even downloaded half of the 7500. At this rate, it will be 4 days of downloading.

My internet connection is 30mbps. I could be getting the files at 13gb an hour.
If I were downloading 50gb of music from a Usenet server, I'd have the files in under 2 hours.

Funny how iTunes originally got people away from Napster because iTunes was actually faster and easier than stealing. To quote Bob Dylan, "The times they are a changin'".

 

[baleensavage]

I totally agree. I finally signed up for iTunes match so I could have a cloud backup of all my music as well as getting upgraded copies of some old albums I encoded at low bit rates. It's been uploading on and off all weekend long and is still a ways off from being done. Not only that, when it is uploading it totally takes down my internet to the point where it's barely usable. I could have uploaded the 2,000 some odd songs using Dropbox or Amazon cloud in a fraction of that time and only seen a small hit to my internet connection. Not to mention all the vanishing album art. Plus, the stop upload function doesn't pause the process, it starts it all over. Thankfully it doesn't reupload files, but still, it takes a good 10 minutes of "checking my iTunes library" before it starts uploading again. This is not the type of service I've come to expect from Apple.

 

[PNutts]

Something is definitely wrong. If it's not Apple's servers, could your ISP be throttling you?

I'm an e-mail guy and don't know enough about networking to determine where the latency is. How about loading a few albums up to Google Music and see if you can reproduce the behavior?

 

[mcdj]

Something is definitely wrong. If it's not Apple's servers, could your ISP be throttling you?

I'm an e-mail guy and don't know enough about networking to determine where the latency is. How about loading a few albums up to Google Music and see if you can reproduce the behavior?

I download large files all the time at 30mbps. No throttling here.

 

[PNutts]

I download large files all the time at 30mbps. No throttling here.

OK, but the ISP's have been proven to throttle certain types of traffic. If it's only songs from Apple then it could be their servers or something in between you and them. There's a big difference between large files and 7500 smallish ones.

Since I don't have the tools or talent all I can offer are suggestions. One thing I would do is download an album on my iPhone, and then go to someone else's wifi connection and compare the download speeds. Or have them do it.

Probably first I would call my ISP and report the slow speed and see if they can do the analysis between endpoints. Without more data it could even be your router/cable modem. A quick unplug will flush a lot of buffers.

 

[milo]

If it's not Apple's servers, could your ISP be throttling you?

Sure looks like it's Apple's servers.

 

[britcay]

not downloading, it's UPloading...

It's not your 30mb download speed you're hitting, it's your upload speed... If you use regular ADSL (even bonded, uber-gigabyte ADSL) only has around 400-500k upload capacity. This is the bottleneck for the match process.

In theory it should be fine once the upload has completed, as it only uploads new, unmatched songs. Tho a few hundred of mine have the cloud 'error' symbol next to them, so they failed for some reason. I feel your pain!