Force Mac OSX notes to refresh &/or force iOS notes to update FASTER

The process to refresh things on OS X is bird

You can see the log file on OS X to see when changes are pushed to the Mac by Apple's push notification service:

brctl log -w

The same process runs on iOS, but you'll be hard pressed to interact with it unless you jailbreak. Pragmatically, the daemon will notice an interruption of all network activity, so put the iOS device in AirPlane mode for 15 seconds at least and then re-connect to a known good network to let the changes in the local notes database get pushed to the cloud.

You can monitor things and see if the problem is Apple's server side being busy or if it's your network connectivity if needed.