OneDrive is soooooooooooooooooooooo slow!

[adhdave83]

Why is OneDrive for Business so unacceptably slow? I've had a case open with Microsoft Support since February and to date they have involved several different teams, run numerous diagnostics and tests remotely on my computer, but still haven't been able to improve let alone resolve the very poor download speeds we are getting across the company. They can see the issue with their own eyes, and the under-performing tests are appearing in their diagnostic logs, but for whatever reason they cannot fix their own systems!

We have a fibre-optic leased line, 100Mbit over a 1Gbit bearer. Running a speed test, I am getting the full 100Mbit up and down, and yet when I am downloading a file (whether it's a few MB or a few hundred MB) from OneDrive, the download rate hovers between 500Kb/s and 800Kb/s.

Uploading the OneDrive for Business is fine - the upload rate is between 7Mb/s and 9Mb/s. It's just the download rate that's the issue.

Whenever any of our users save anything to OneDrive and the document is no longer cached, they have to wait for what feels like an eternity for the file to be downloaded before it can be opened. If they're opening the file via an application, then that application will hang and stop responding until the file has been downloaded from their OneDrive.

Before we switched to Microsoft 365, we hosted everything locally. Anything we tried to open would do so almost instantly. But using OneDrive feels like we have travelled back in time to the days of 56K/ISDN.

If this is how OneDrive has been designed, then it should not be labelled as a business service. There are other solutions out there from competitors that outperform OneDrive, and unfortunately if these issues are not resolved soon, I doubt we will be the only business who migrates away from OneDrive or even Microsoft altogether.

[#2]

@adhdave83 This is not the experience I have had with OneDrive for Business in any of the organisations I've worked for where it can be faster than on-prem file storage  You'll have to work with Microsoft to determine the characteristics of your unique environment.  My guess is you have local services inhibiting sync.

[#3]

That's your opinion, but it's not just me. There are loads of other complaints online when searching for OneDrive performance issues. Microsoft Support has just told me their senior engineers haven't bothered to respond to them since they last sent them more diagnostics over 2 weeks ago.

I suspect we're being throttled by SharePoint, as I can download a 100MB file at full rate first time, second time, third time... Wait a few minutes and try the same or a different file and it'll be downloading at somewhere between 400kb/s to 800kb/s, during which time there's no excessive bandwidth usage our end, and even running a speed test shows a throughput of 100Mbit both ways, and yet after the speed test completes (which was running during the slow download from OneDrive), the OneDrive download speed does not improve.

It's not a Windows thing either. I get the same behaviour when downloading files from one of our Linux servers hosted in a London data centre... The first few downloads are downloaded at a rate of over 100mb/s, but then suddenly the next lots of downloads are downloading at the same 400kb/s to 800kb/s rate.

[#4]

I agree. OneDrive is ludicrously slow to get going. Once it's uploading it's fine, but it sits on 'Processing changes' for a LONG time. Sometimes over 5/10 minutes for one 1mb file...

[#5]

It's not my "opinion". It's my "experience" from many organisations using OneDrive.

I've seen people blaming data centers for slow speeds when it turns out they've got custom SOE issues or security services running on their local machines which are interfering with all cloud services (OneDrive, Dropbox, Google etc).