Google Drive slow downloads through Rclone? Just me?

Help and Support
21

See my last point above. Pester them. :slight_smile:

22

Contrary to what Google customer service told me today, the problem is not fixed.

What I find strange, and worrying, is that I've just tested and Firefox downloads at acceptable speeds whereas rclone mount is stuck at 1.2Mbps, after an initial burst that lasts about ten seconds.

Is Google throttling rclone? I have tried setting rclone's user agent to my current Firefox installation's one, nothing changed.

Edit: tested web interface through Chromium. Fast download speeds (hundreds of Mbps) whereas, with the same file, an instant before, rclone was crawling at 10Mbps...

23

I don't know what's going on inside Google, I suppose it's possibly they have some infrastructure problems and are prioritizing traffic from their own software vs third-party & at certain times of the day throttling until it's resolved, I can only speculate.

I am getting this kind of performance during the night on gigabit:

INFO - process - execute - Transferred: 185.197 GiB / 304.913 GiB, 61%, 111.443 MiB/s, ETA 18m20s

24

This is so annoying, this has already been going on since last week, I hope it doesn't go beyond this week, damn we are in 2026 and I've never had such bandwidth problems before such as being throttled to 10mbps for 15 hours a day

25

Have you contacted their customer service? I am trying to make them see reason but I think more people asking for resolution would be better.

26

It seems that the throttling issue hasn't occurred over the weekend, at least in my case. Perhaps they have already finished the maintenance work or whatever was causing the issue, or maybe it is planned to resume during the working week.

27

Throttling still going on for me.

28

I ran a bunch of download tests over the weekend, and although the speed wasn't always consistent, I never saw it drop below 8 MB/s at worst, with average speeds above 20 MB/s. Today, however, the throttling came back, and I saw speeds drop to 2ā€“3 MB/s several times.

29

I can confirm that throttling is a thing also here both on download & upload (now I'm uploading a file a 300kbps)

30

Yes this is also happening for me now.
Let's hope those are just "technical difficulties" and not a new service strategy.

31

I have not yet checked but I doubt 300kbps could be compliant with their SLA. I pay for terabytes of storage. This way they're basically unaccessable.

32

I have had nice performance since yesterday, cautiosly optimistic things are better now.

Anyone else?

33

Yes, same here. Performance has been noticeably better for me as well. That said, speeds also seemed to improve last weekend, only to get worse again on Monday. So I'm wary of what might happen tomorrow.

34

doesnt sound like just you. a few people hitting weekday afternoon throttles on drive via rclone while the browser download stays fine usually means google is shaping the api/client traffic, not your nic.

things that sometimes help a bit:

  • confirm youre on a personal client id (you are) and not sharing it across a ton of machines
    • try --drive-chunk-size 64M / lower --transfers on big files so it stops flapping
    • --drive-pacer-min-sleep 10ms and watch for 403 rateLimitExceeded in -vv
    • compare a single rclone copy of one big file vs the mount path; mounts often look worse under random reads
      if browser is still 10x faster on the same file at the same hour its almost certainly drive-side api shaping. waiting it out or spreading the pull overnight is the boring answer that usually works for me.