iCloud private relay is dramatically slowing my data connections on WiFi and cellular. Noticed it with all my apps and ran a speed test, with relay on my phone was doing 10-12mbps down on cellular and WiFi. Turned relay off and my speeds jumped back up to where they should be at. Suspect this is a ios17 problem. Saw a few other posts of users experiencing the same thing.
UPDATE: 17.2 does NOT seemed to have fixed this. I’m still experiencing extreme slowness with it enabled.
Ahhhh I couldn’t figure out what is killing my speed until I turned off private relay (17.2). It was giving me 30mbs when I turned it off 500mbs, insane
Wow I thought I was going crazy until I finally remembered I had IPR enabled on most of my devices! For me, the issue started to suddenly show about 3-4 weeks ago, which aligns with the release of iOS/iPad OS 17.4 (maybe a coincidence, maybe not). The issue was most noticeable on streaming sites and their apps, especially YouTube. I was experiencing buffering every 2 seconds or so on 144p videos, despite having fiber internet with ~3Gpbs down/up. I’ve since updated to 17.4.1 but the issue remains.
The only device I consume media on but wasn’t experiencing the issue with was my Apple TV, which now makes total sense as IPR isn’t available on it!
I was working around it for awhile by using a VPN which actually improved my download speeds and seemed to bypass the IPR issue. Now that I’ve figured out the actual cause though, disabling IPR on all my devices INSTANTLY fixed the issue as far as I can tell. Streaming at high quality again with no buffering, and sites (like Google) are responsive and quick.
speed tests don’t really function properly with icloud relay because of the technology - the QUIC tunnel doesn’t lend itself well to the numerours artificial connections made by the speed test sites.
Also, unless your apps are using HTTP instead of HTTPS, then icloud relay will be involved only in the DNS resolution part of the app experience which should be a pretty much unnoticeable difference, unless the ODOH servers you’re connecting to are having problems (unlikely, and unlikely to last).
Switching from mobile data to wifi or vice versa should change your whole connection route with icloud relay.
The only way to test how much slower the experience with icloud relay is, would be to actually just test and time web browsing in safari which would not be very scientific.
The app speed stuff is completely in your imagination and the speed test results are not reliable so… I just wouldn’t waste your time on this unless you are really having to wait for pages to load in safari.
Personally, IPR works less well for me on my wifi because of the traffic shaping I’m using on my network.
Yeah I’m experiencing the same thing. I usually get a down/up of about 600mbps~ but on my new MacBook Pro M3 I’m getting about 500mbps down but 50mpbs up. Hopefully what the other commenter said was correct and that it’s just the speed tests unable to properly measure speeds with iCloud Private Relay on. Personally, I don’t notice a difference in connection quality, I only noticed this while running a random speed test.
Also, isn’t it ONLY used with Safari and not by other Apps? For example, if I go to whatitmyip in chrome or another browser it shows my real IP but only Safari will show my IPR IP. Apps do not use IPR.
I didn’t think of it being PR, but was experiencing all sorts of network problems. Turned off PR and voila, everything’s working fine. And this is macOS on a physical LAN.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t PR start fine and barely took anything off the top? What happened?
I started noticing it when YouTube had to buffer all of a sudden on my Mac. Did a test and went from 600 mbps to 3 mbps. LOL! Security comes at a large cost in speed.
It happens to me, but only on cellular, not in wifi. When I’m on cellular, with PR, the first few websites I open will take forever to load, or simply show some connection error. I would have to turn the aeroplane mode on and off to be able to load in safari. Things work perfectly fine on wifi though
JFC, Apple, get it together!