Does Microsoft throttle OneDrive throughput during long uploads?


Baeolophus

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I am uploading approximately 57 GB of files to OneDrive. It appears the transfer speed at the beginning of this upload was considerably faster than it is now. Over 10 hours have passed, and it is currently 11:43 PM EDT.

I am wondering whether this is due to active throttling of users consuming significant resources, or simply because more users are accessing the OneDrive servers during the evening hours. Does anyone have an answer that is not just speculation?
 
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I am wondering whether this is due to active throttling of users consuming significant resources, or simply because more users are accessing the OneDrive servers during the evening hours. Does anyone have an answer that is not just speculation?
As a former admin for an online service, there is no such thing as "evening hours" or slow periods because you have users from multiple time zones, and file syncing is a constant process.

There is not enough information provided to add any speculation. A file sync of 57 GB could be a mix of:
- (1) 57 GB file
- a few very large GB-sized files
- thousands of smaller MB-sized files

Like any file copy, syncing requires both sides to compare what files they have, and their timestamps/checksums. A lot of the slow overhead in file copy or syncing is normally consumed by tracking each file. Having thousands of small files means more time is relatively spent in the overhead vs. a pure network transfer.

I would open up Resource Monitor, and see how much disk read activity is going on.
 

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Just checking that you are a Microsoft 365 user that includes 1tb of onedrive storage and are not just a standard Onedrive user that has 5gb of free onedrive storage.
 

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Not much data to say a conclusive answer, but I don't think that OneDrive throtles uploads.

More often than not, it'll be your ISP who throtles you or provide asymetric connections to residential users. A speed test will quickly confirm this. There is also the chance that the ISP will degrade speed for long running uploads as it's not the typical usage pattern of home users.
 

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there is no such thing as "evening hours"
FUP is usually applied by ISP, but MS is known to limit speed of windows updates during a high traffic and if local servers are limited due to the maintenance or under DDoS, it could result in such a behavior.
- thousands of smaller MB-sized files
Indeed, this resembles torrents and other P2P, which can be an issue.
It could be throttled by ISP, DNS, AV, network settings/driver and etc.

When I reupload 40GB of thousands of files it takes roughly and hour.
 

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I regularly upload 60 GB in approx 20 mins at different times. I have never seen Onedrive throttling speeds. Sounds to me more like an ISP issue.
 

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