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Was tuning my home Wifi and noticed that some of my Apple devices (iPad, iPhone, MacBook Pro, iMac Pro) were not getting the same download speeds when testing via Speedtest. On a Mac with two user accounts, one account would consistently get about 10Mbps faster speed than another account. Initially thinking that there might be a user-level app that was running on log in, a launchdaemon or launchagent process, or a browser extension that was causing the slowdown in the affected account led to a process of turning everything off. But still, the slowdown didn’t go away.

As this was affecting not only Macs, but iPads and iPhones, I started looking deeper into what was similar with the accounts and devices that had the slow speed. It turned out to be Apple’s iCloud Drive feature. All the slow devices were logged into iCloud, and specifically, had the iCloud Drive feature turned on. When that is turned on, the download speed is slowed by about 10Mbps. It’s like it reserves this for it’s own use and is not available for other applications. And it’s not just in http web traffic, it’s at the device level as testing via Speedtest in a web browser or using the CLI test via Terminal yields the same reduction in speed.

You can do this simple test yourself. Just run Speedtest on any of the devices with iCloud Drive on, and then off. If you have a 100Mbps connection I suppose it doesn’t matter much, but losing 10Mbps isn’t what I signed up for in using iCloud Drive. Needless to say I’ve disabled iCloud Drive across all of them and reclaimed by DL speed, and will use one of the other cloud storage services like Dropbox or OneDrive that doesn’t silently take away my download speed.

Affected devices: Macs running 10.15.7 and 11.0.1; iOS and iPadOS 14.2

I’ve just gone through moving a set of WordPress sites that was part of a multisite network on a Digital Ocean droplet. The motivation was having the multisite move off Ubuntu 14 to the more recent version Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS so I could use certbot to install and keep up to date SSL certificates from LetsEncrypt.

There’s a lot of opinions, suggestions and tips on how to do this. One of the most informative is here. Essentially, there’s two approaches. Use the built in Export/Import fuction that exports an XML file that can be imported on another WordPress site, or a plugin that backs up everything and migrates it on another host at the filesystem level.

The benefit of the latter is that if you have a highly customised site with lots of plugins, after migrating to a new host, everything should just work. The downside is that there are many tools, none are free, and it’s not clear if it will work until you pay for the plugin.

Since my sites were relatively straightforward, I used the built in Export/Import function and then manually installed the required theme and settings. This might not work for complex e-commerce and customised sites.

To get SSL working, these tips on Digital Ocean is helpful: enable-https and apache-virtual-hosts. After setting it all up, you should check that you have all your virtual hosts setup properly.

Then check to see the quality of your SSL implementation at ssllabs.com. To get an A+ you might need to disable old protocols like TLS 1.0 and weak ciphers. And enabe HSTS. When that’s done, sit back and smile.