
Dropbox ignores user's complaints of poor performance for almost a year - charkubi
https://www.dropboxforum.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/201241429--OS-X-Dropbox-consuming-a-lot-of-CPU-whenever-any-file-or-folder-is-changed-anywhere
======
jwr
Dropbox is in my opinion synonymous with poor performance. The client always
consumed way too much CPU. On a Mac, Dropbox will react to changes anywhere in
the filesystem, and consume excessive amounts of CPU even if the files you
work on have nothing to do with Dropbox. If you use selective sync, stuff that
lands in folders _not synced_ to your computer will still cause Dropbox to
consume CPU.

Storing a lot of files inside your Dropbox will also cause performance
problems. Which means that paying for extra space (I do) isn't that useful if
you intend to keep your git repos with source code there.

It has been like that for years, the company has made little progress
performance-wise (instead we got useless things like photo-something-or-other-
that-tries-to-access-my-photos).

I learned to live with it, because the advantages of Dropbox outweigh the
disadvantages of a poor implementation. Dropbox is still a very good product,
even if you have to pay a hefty price in CPU and battery life for it. I dream
that one day someone will decide that performance is a goal worth pursuing and
finally optimize the thing.

~~~
modoc
Why would you put your git repo in DropBox? That seems counter-intuitive to
me. I specifically keep anything in a VCS out of DropBox since then you're
versioning stuff twice....

I have just under 150,000 files in DropBox and haven't noticed any performance
issues. DropBox rarely shows up in Activity Monitor's first 20 CPU users
(unlike MediaFire which is usually burning CPU for no reason and only managing
200 files).

Perhaps it's an OS difference? I am on OS X 10.11.1.

~~~
benologist
Dropbox = real time, automatic, versioned backup of all files in your entire
project, making you and your work safe from deleting files, accidentally
overwriting files etc, all the time.

Git = not that.

~~~
RightWingRabble
Have you ever tried AeroFS?

------
shinratdr
Poor performance, broken in Windows when using roaming profiles, storing
binaries in the user's roaming AppData folder on Windows, DLL injection in
Windows and god-knows-what in OS X to alter Explorer & Finder icons, low base
storage.

The only thing Dropbox has going for it is that somehow, everyone else is
worse. Core syncing and client reliability is just trash across the board for
all the other providers. But Dropbox is still infuriating.

~~~
zzleeper
What bothers me about Dropbox is that many of the complaints I had 7 years ago
are still there...

For instance, I can't exclude folders and extensions, which messes up my
workflow a lot (e.g. I can't exclude .git folders)

~~~
blakeyrat
Years ago I tried to buy a gift subscription of Dropbox for a friend so we
could collaborate.

Still impossible.

These guys can't even manage GIFT CERTIFICATES, I'm not surprised they have
trouble with actual technical issues.

~~~
lazy_lizard
[https://www.dropbox.com/gift](https://www.dropbox.com/gift)

~~~
WillKirkby
"Sorry! Gifting isn’t available in your country yet. Sign up for
notifications, and we’ll email you once it’s available."

~~~
shinratdr
I got the same message in Canada.

------
rconti
Wow, guess I'm the only one who never noticed performance issues on my Macs. I
remember when Google Drive first came out years ago, the client caused the
system to slow to a halt, so I stopped using it. I'm sure it got fixed, but it
only takes one bad experience to kill it for a user.

Interesting thread.

~~~
codazoda
I've had a similar experience.

I've never noticed a problem with Dropbox. Of course, I'm not running tools
that show me battery consumption of apps and such on my Mac. Battery lasts
long enough that it's never been a problem to look into.

I also had trouble with early versions of Google Drive. Maybe it's time to
give it a try again. The problem I had was that drive thought all of my files
had changed every day and started syncing the entire Google Drive folder
again. I removed it and haven't tried it again since.

~~~
ypeterholmes
On my macbook pro Google Drive has improved but still causes trouble and
generally runs much slower than dropbox, which has always run flawlessly.

------
martin_
I've been noticing poor performance too, in addition to some weird bugs. I've
had files completely disappear, the response from support is attached below. I
still don't have those files back, they were not critical but now I have
learned to use dropbox for (slow) syncing between machines, and use an
external drive for redundancy.

Support response:

The event you've provided shows and deletion of 12 files as well as an
addition of 12 files. When this happens in the exact same event, it is due to
a move or to renaming a folder 99% of the time.

To recover your correct previous versions of these files, you may be able to
rename the folder back to exactly what is what named prior.

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AYBABTME
Millions if not billions of users, a dozen comments on a forum. Looks like an
anecdotal thing more than a widespread issue.

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Scaevolus
On Windows, Dropbox has a global file watch and does filtering to determine if
the files should be synced:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9136546](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9136546)

~~~
zw
It seems like they do that on OS X as well.

------
itslennysfault
Typical Dropbox...

I've been bugging them about a solution to the file limit for at least a year
with no response. I finally got a (public) response by tweeting at them. They
said they would follow up with me and they never did. Even a "we can't fix
this" would be better than the dead air I've received.

I really don't know how they intend to compete with the software giant's
similar offerings if it's not via superior customer service.

For anyone not aware of the file count issue you cannot have more than
~300,000 files on dropbox before it totally falls apart. I was paying for 1TB
of storage and using about 3% of it when it totally stopped syncing.

~~~
AYBABTME
inotify has a limit on how many watches can be held. I don't think that 300k
limit is particular to Dropbox, any tool working on the same principle will
hit that limit.

~~~
ars
They should watch the directory, not the file.

The limit is found here: /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches and defaults to
8K, not 300K, so I don't think it's the cause of this problem.

~~~
AYBABTME
You're right, I was mistaken. The limit is a user limit.

------
nodesocket
I use Dropbox to sync my ~/Sites folder in OS X, between my three macs. It
works.... Except when it can't figure out a conflict and creates CONFLICTED
copies of git object, refs, head files. Quickly turns into a nightmare.

CONFLICTED copies in Dropbox drives me absolutely nuts, and should not happen
since I never edit the files concurrently.

------
octref
Dropbox also ruined one of my favorite mail client on Mac: Mailbox. Somehow
they did an update from 0.4x to 0.7x which made the client orders of magnitude
uglier, crash more often, have dozens of rendering issues which never happened
in 0.4x. They did this without communicating anything in their blog[0], and
meanwhile totally ignores all the complaints in Dropbox forum[1].

[0]: [https://blogs.dropbox.com/mailbox/](https://blogs.dropbox.com/mailbox/)

[1]: [https://www.dropboxforum.com/hc/en-
us/community/topics/20021...](https://www.dropboxforum.com/hc/en-
us/community/topics/200211215-Mailbox?sort_by=recent_activity)

------
kmfrk
Dropbox is literally the worst app on my MacBook Air. It's such a POS, it
blows my mind that Dropbox can suck so hard on a platform as important as OS
X.

I had to give up syncing some parts, because the problems would create a bevy
of file conflicts.

------
BorisMelnik
Definitely something I'd like to see fixed. What I find crazy about that
thread, and something I would find unacceptable is how many people on that
forum basically using it as a means to advertise for the competition (Google
Drive.)

Not saying that shouldn't be allowed, but you'd think the community manager
would make it a point to take that feature right to the dev team. I know its
not an easy fix, but definitely something that would immediately satisfy a
large group of users.

Not to mention from a 'green' perspective the amount of CPU cycles, Wi-Fi
packets, etc that could be saved from fixing this.

------
neckro23
I've been bitten by this problem too. What's extra obnoxious about it is that
the client used to work just fine -- but a couple years ago it started
randomly hogging an entire CPU core for seemingly no reason at all.

I still use it, but Dropbox's refusal to do anything about this problem (or
even acknowledge that it exists!) is mostly what's prevented me from taking
the leap to a paid account.

It's too bad, because Dropbox's speed, simplicity and (at the time) minimal
performance hit was what I originally liked about it compared to other sync
solutions. Now it's missing all three.

------
gwbas1c
I find this very strange, as the major file synchronization client that I work
on doesn't have this problem. We use the fsevents API, and it's pretty
localized to the folders we monitor.

(I will admit that we have performance issues when users sync more than
100,000 files; but that's more due to fundamental limits of what you can do in
a user-mode application.)

Perhaps Dropbox is just trying to trap deleting / moving / renaming the
Dropbox folder? That's something that's tricky to do; and we had to disable
our technique to do it because it had too many side effects.

~~~
zw
Based on the warnings in the Console log back when I used Dropbox, Dropbox
isn't using fsevents API appropriately but is instead reading from the raw
fsevents firehose.

------
zackify
I've had my public links blocked for three years. The reason? "Temporarily
blocked due to too much traffic". 3 years is temporary huh? I have even tried
emailing support. No response.

------
KuhlMensch
I use Seafile, I've not looked at how secure it is, so I only store non-
sensitive stuff on it. Its not a "Dropbox but better", its different with
different controls. I use to to selectively sync folders, and preference
files. Other than that I can't really say much, the mobile app shat itself
last time I tried to back up photos (~2 months ago). Its wobbly, but I still
prefer it over Dropbox at the moment.

------
free2rhyme214
Dropbox's energy performance vs. Google Drive:

[http://imageshack.com/a/img908/1838/YHDwZ6.png](http://imageshack.com/a/img908/1838/YHDwZ6.png)

I only keep Dropbox because they automatically stick my screenshots in a
folder and sync it.

------
benologist
I have to keep it closed 1/2 the time, which makes it a terrible solution for
multi-device syncing and sharing files. All this in addition to laughably
primitive functionality! The worst part is I pay for nothing to ever improve.

------
powera
More accurate: "people keep piling into a bug thread about one symptom with
many possible causes for over a year".

~~~
mkempe
Ignoring accumulated customer complaints is not good customer service,
regardless of what you imagine their misconceptions may be.

------
ossreality
And they're still the only one that works worth a damn on Linux and Windows.
So sadly, I'm still using them.

Though, I've never, ever had a perf problem with it.

------
sshykes
Do any good people even work at Dropbox?

I submitted my resume years ago and never heard back. I wonder who they hired
instead..

Other than Guido, of course :)

~~~
mtrpcic
Please don't make blanket statements that discredit the work of an entire
engineering team that you have little insight into. I'm sure there are strong
engineers at Dropbox, the same as there are anywhere else. Statements like
that are not what HackerNews is for.

