Microsoft Graph - OneDrive - Large file uploads - Performance issue

Question

We are using 'Upload large files with an upload session' REST API call (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/driveitem-createuploadsession?view=graph-rest-1.0#create-an-upload-session) in order to upload large files. Since the introduction of this API (~2017) we noticed that the transfer performance is rather underwhelming. After revising the issue and running some tests it seems that this is still the case. For example, when uploading 100 4GB files we get an average transfer rate of around 25 MByte/s. Compared to Google Drive where the transfer rate for the same files maxes out the bandwidth of the connection (GBit/s), regardless of the physical location of the involved peers. One obvious cause for this is the rather low max fragment size of 60MB and the fact that all requests have to be done in sequential order:
"You can upload the entire file, or split the file into multiple byte ranges, as long as the maximum bytes in any given request is less than 60 MiB." As an intermediary "fix" is there a chance the max fragment size can be increased to a more suitable value for today's typical bandwidth delay products? This would reduce the number of requests and therefore the time where no data is being sent at all. Thank you.

Answer 1

Hello Mat,

Thanks for reaching out!

As per the documentation, you can only upload the entire file, or split the file into multiple byte ranges, as long as the maximum byte in any given request is less than 60 MiB, otherwise you might get throttled.

Please follow the best practices while creating upload session as well.

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