With the new iCloud Drive app in iOS 9 I've decided to start making more use of iCloud Drive. I found the post about the "External Files" command in the Reader, which I had been unaware of. This is a really great feature, and I have put a lot of my Chinese texts on iCloud Drive to that I can access them from within Pleco. However, when I tried opening a file, even a quite small file, it seemed to take a very long time to open. A 2k file took about a minute and a half to open. Perhaps this is due to congestion on the iCloud server or on the net generally. But when I try to open a small file in the iCloud Drive app on my iPad it opens almost immediately. So it seems to be a Pleco issue. Could this be an iOS 9 issue? I've never tried this on iOS 8, as I just discovered the feature today, and I've already to OS 9.
External file access to iCloud slow?
- Thread starter dcarpent
- Start date
Shouldn't be that slow - seems to be working reasonably quickly on an iPhone here. What about if you open a file in iCloud Drive that hasn't been on your iPhone before (that was added from your computer, say), does it take a while to open then?
It would be slower than opening it in the iCloud Drive app because due to some rather spectacular bugs in iCloud Drive on iOS 8 (which we won't be able to abandon for a few months yet) we have to copy files from there into our own separate container before we can reliably do anything with them - can't simply use the iCloud Drive versions in place as the system was originally designed to allow.
It'll get much faster (no need to download anything that's already on your iPhone) once we abandon iOS 8. To be honest we didn't put a lot of time into this feature after we discovered those bugs, so we'll probably flesh it out more in other ways too (letting you save files to iCloud Drive easily as well, e.g.) once we start focusing on 9 primarily/exclusively, at least assuming we don't find any major new bugs
It would be slower than opening it in the iCloud Drive app because due to some rather spectacular bugs in iCloud Drive on iOS 8 (which we won't be able to abandon for a few months yet) we have to copy files from there into our own separate container before we can reliably do anything with them - can't simply use the iCloud Drive versions in place as the system was originally designed to allow.
It'll get much faster (no need to download anything that's already on your iPhone) once we abandon iOS 8. To be honest we didn't put a lot of time into this feature after we discovered those bugs, so we'll probably flesh it out more in other ways too (letting you save files to iCloud Drive easily as well, e.g.) once we start focusing on 9 primarily/exclusively, at least assuming we don't find any major new bugs
I tried it again this morning and the response time was much better, much more like the time it takes to load a file that I have stored locally on my phone. So I'm guessing that the files I was trying to retrieve last night had not yet made it onto Apple's server, and the long lag time was actually the time it was taking to upload the file to the server and then download it to my iPhone. I added a large group of files to the iCloud Drive all at once, and they probably hadn't finished uploading. I assumed that if they were showing in my iCloud Drive folder on my phone that they had finished uploading to the server. But perhaps this is not the case. Like iTunes match it seems to take quite a while for things to upload. Perhaps the faster time I saw on my iPad was just the luck of getting a file that had finished uploading. At any rate, things seem to be working normally on the iPhone this morning. Sorry to have taken up your time. I should have given iCloud Drive more time before assuming something might be wrong.
I'm glad I discovered this feature (the external files feature that is). Thanks for implementing it. It is a great help.
I'm glad I discovered this feature (the external files feature that is). Thanks for implementing it. It is a great help.