Hi @egarner,
Sorry, I read the mb initially as megabytes instead of megabits.
Generally I will see this behavior because, on start, odrive will end up uploading many large files at the same time and then taper off to only one large file at a time. By design it is only supposed to upload one large file at a time (over 100MB), but there is a bug where, on start, it can end up uploading several at teh same time. For faster connections this can lead to improved speeds. I explain it more here: Upload speed slowing down after a while
This is something we are improving in the next major release, but it is not ready yet.
If you want to schedule a script/task to shutdown and restart, I would suggest using the CLI to perform the shutdown. There was a thread here that touched on some similar ideas, if you want to take a look: Odrive CLI shutdown- Finish uploads option