Caching server speed

[plawrence]

Hi all

For those of you running Caching Servers for iOS, what speeds are your clients downloading cached items at? I've just setup a 10.11.2 Mac Mini with the Caching Service and it doesn't seem all that fast. Activity Monitor's network statistics report ~8MB/sec outbound. I was expecting these app installs to be much faster!

[davidacland]

I haven't measured it, but that is possible depending on the network speed etc. Could you share what type of drive is in the Mac mini and the speed of the wireless network the iOS devices are connecting to?

[plawrence]

@davidacland Thanks. The Mini has two drives, a Flash drive for the OS and a SATA drive which the Cache data is stored on. The iPads are connecting to a 5GHz wireless network.

[daz_wallace]

@plawrence If you could provide the type of wireless connection that the iPads are connected over (e.g. 802.11g, 802.11n, 802.11ac) this would give an indicator of speed.

Also the number of devices connecting to the access point will affect the speed of the transfer as the maximum wireless speed is both the theoretical max (think of the quoted miles per gallon for a car) and is shared between the number of devices connecting to each access point.

[wdpickle]

we just added 350 iPads to our system (DEP -> JSS -> reset device) over the holiday break. We have a single mac-mini as a cache server for the site we are at . I was kinda watching the server but not really. We added 40ish apps to 300 of the iPads and another 20 to the rest, all forced down. I wasn't paying attention to the bandwidth but did check the APs for load once just to make sure I wasn't overloading the APs to badly. We had about 30 iPads per AP and the process took 6.5 hours to complete. We are going to be adding more devices in the next few months with the same set up (most likely not as many at a time). After the fact I went in and pulled stats on a single client (random iPad). I looked to see if there were any standouts, all were pretty similar. I show we had a max in of 1.009 Mbps with an average of 12.8 Kbps for most of the period. I will run some stats on the mac-mini next time to see hard its breathing.
We have 5 year old Aruba APs, switches and controllers. All iPads connect at 5Ghz/802.11n. As I said before 30 (ish) iPads per AP and about 15 APs loading and a single Mac mini on a 1GB hardwired directly into the Aruba switch the APs are plugged into.
The only other point to mention is these are 9.2 so we did have a few MDM bugs hit

edit mini is 10.11.2

[JAMFatJESD]

I have seen the same behavior. We have been using the Caching Server a for more than one year. Our speeds were rather fast and they have come to a crawl.

After troubleshooting with Apple for 2 weeks, they come back and informed me that it is a know issue where the Caching Server is being bypassed with VPP Apps and iOS 10 updates. They also informed me that they are working on it.

Also, we have our two Mac Mini Caching Servers connected to 1gbps ethernet.

[jjvanboxtel]

I too have been using the caching service for around a year and it started out okay but has never been as fast as I would have expected. I generally see speeds around 8Mbps. We have a multi-site setup with a caching server per site and one central MDM server. This was the recommended setup from Apple Enterprise Support and it has never worked very well. @JAMFatJESD I am interested in your communications with Apple to see what they come up with. Can you post any solutions they give you?

We are running Meru 802.11ac wireless and usually have around 15 iPads per AP.

[JAMFatJESD]

The apple caching server has been broken for several months. It has nothing to do with your configurations, specially with iOS updates and Apps.

Apple has been slowly working on a fix and I was just informed that the Beta 10.2 iOS fixes the catching. I say slowly because I have reported this to Apple since the release of iOS 9.3, which is when I noticed the issues.

When the Caching server was working for us, the speeds were good. The low speeds and the long times that you experience when enrolling new iPads are because they are installing directly from Apple. The Caching server picks some random apps and iPads to install a few a the Apps and Updates, then everything else is downloaded from Apple.

I do not have any feed back on Mac OSX as we do not manage our macs apps as we only have and handful.