MBP 13" 2018: WiFi download much slower than upload

[j.quintana]

I have my 13" MBP with Touchbar (2018) for 6 weeks now and I can't solve one issue:

When I'm uploading bigger files (videos for example) to my NAS (Synology DiskStation) through my Router (Fritzbox 7490) I get phenomenal transfer speeds of 70-100 MBytes/s.
When I'm downloading the same files from my NAS I only get 13-18 MBytes/s with the same 5 GHz connection. Don't get me wrong, this is still a transfer rate that I can live with since I rarely download large quantities of data but it still makes me think that the download *could* be much higher if the upload already is very fast.

I don't know if this issue is related to my MBP, the router or my NAS and I don't really know how to test which device is responsible for this odd behaviour. All the WiFi speed test programs that I found use the internet connection to determine the upload and download speed. But since I only have 50 MBps (around 6 MByte/s) internet speed this won't help here.

I still think that the MBP might be the cause of this issue here because on my old Windows desktop PC the upload speed was the same as the download speed (also in the 13-18 MByte range of my MBP download). So there is something with the MBP that helped speed up the upload speed dramatically. I only wonder why it doesn't work with downloads over WiFi?

Any ideas?

 

[solouki]

Hi j.quintana,

If you have a second computer (Mac, PC, Windows, Linux, Raspberry Pi) on your WiFi network, then you might find some interesting results using "iperf3", available on the Mac from MacPorts, Homebrew, or Fink.

On one computer you run iperf3 in server mode, on a second computer you run iperf3 in client mode. iPerf collects statistics on the speed of data transfer over your network connection, in this case, your WiFi LAN network.

To run iperf3 for 5 minutes collecting statistics, from Terminal windows type:

<Computer 1>$ sudo iperf3 -s --> server mode
<Computer 2>$ sudo iperf3 -c <IP-address/DNS-name> -t 300 -I 10 --> client mode

where <IP-address/DNS-name> is either the IP address of the iperf3 server, say "192.168.1.10", or the DNS name of the server, say "Computer-2.local". You can then switch the server and client machines and run iperf3 in the reverse direction.

Good luck.

 

[jerryk]

Double check how you have you are accessing your shares on your Synology. If you don't use afp it can be slow.

Here is a someone that had this issue: https://forum.synology.com/enu/viewtopic.php?t=129815

 

[j.quintana]

The AFP protocol wasn't activated on my DiskStation but I've just tested it and the issue is the same as with the SMB protocol that I was using all the time.

@solouki Unfortunately I don't have a second computer to test this. Maybe I can test it with a friend's laptop. Although it should be a laptop with the latest WiFi tech because apparently my old desktop PC (which I bought new in 2016 and it was no slouch) also wasn't able to exceed 20 MByte/s in either direction.

 

[Howard2k]

Do you have an Ethernet adaptor available? If so how does the compare?


Have you tried different locations in your house?
Assuming they’re separate, have you tried both 2.4GHz and 5GHz networks?
What does option click on the wifi show when you’re doing an upload and download? Can you provide screen shots showing activity monitor and your wifi details?
Are you running any compression or encryption on your NAS?
Does the NAS show that it’s busy?

You should be able to capture much of this with a single screenshot for each direction. This is a download, you can see that the download is just ramping up but the signal strength is good and the NAS is not working hard.