
Testing Sync at Dropbox - rbtying
https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/-testing-our-new-sync-engine
======
sujayakar
hey all, author of the previous post
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22595782](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22595782))
here, and I'm happy to answer any questions about the system! I think the
author isaac is here too.

~~~
tasubotadas
Whenever I start Dropbox (boot my laptop) it takes ~30min of maxed out single-
core work to "catch-up" since the "last-update". It's just really annoying as
it makes my laptop quite loud.

Why is that? Google Drive doesn't seem to need to struggle that much.

~~~
bluedino
How much data (total size/count of files) do you have?

~~~
tasubotadas
According to windows: 371790 files and 15.6GB.

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rakoo
Interesting, I learned this technique of having a third, synchronization
intermediary with offlineimap and this helpful blog post:
[http://blog.ezyang.com/2012/08/how-offlineimap-
works/](http://blog.ezyang.com/2012/08/how-offlineimap-works/)

~~~
Xoltus
Thanks for sharing. This is indeed a very helpful blog post

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saagarjha
> To cover this layer of our codebase, we also run Trinity in a “native” mode,
> targeting the platform’s actual filesystem. However, running against the
> native filesystem incurs a huge performance penalty (roughly 10x), which in
> turn means Trinity Native can’t test as many different seeds.

What platforms do you test in “native” mode? What hardware backs it?

~~~
sujayakar
we just use our regular CI infrastructure for running linux, macOS, and
windows. we have infrastructure for managing VMs for our different supported
platforms, setting up filesystems, and so on.

here's a talk from one of our engineers on our macOS CI infrastructure:
[https://blog.macstadium.com/blog/virtualizing-mac-
infrastruc...](https://blog.macstadium.com/blog/virtualizing-mac-
infrastructure-at-scale-a-ci-case-study-with-dropbox)

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amq
I'm sure Dropbox is first-class behind the scenes, but the desktop app has
become simply awful with time, so that I almost feel sorry for them and
embarrassed towards other people when I use Dropbox.

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hilmart
I find the capitalization of the title here on HN to be rather misleading.

I thought Dropbox was actually testing Sync
([https://www.sync.com/](https://www.sync.com/)) in-house and doing a public
comparison.

