Why does Dropbox download so slowly?

[davewiner]

http://www.flickr.com/photos/scriptingnews/5212518385/

[codeglomeration]

It will gradually pick up in a few minutes. I've had that before too. Not sure why sometimes it starts up slowly.

[davewiner → codeglomeration]

It takes a lot longer than a few minutes for it to speed up. Sometimes I come back the next morning and it's still running in the 2K-5K per second range.

I thought it was peer-to-peer, I don't think they're even keeping copies of the data.

BTW, I'm running the 0.8 version, it's supposedly faster, but so far -- doesn't seem to be.

[codeglomeration → davewiner]

I don't think they're using peer to peer. From what I know they use local syncing on the client and the content is uploaded via SSL, and stored encrypted on EC2 storage.

[davewiner → codeglomeration]

Thanks -- a friend and I were discussing that the other day. I wasn't sure, he thought for sure it was P2P.

[xal → davewiner]

It is peer 2 peer within the lan ( see options - enable lan syncing ). This is great for companies that manage shares though dropbox. This way you don't have 40 people download the same bit.

[mahmud]

You don't need a camera to take a screenshot.

[davewiner → mahmud]

Thanks. Usually true, but in this case, I did.

[ninjastar99]

Usually when this happens to me, I close Dropbox (quit the application), wait a few minutes, then re-open it. Typically that fixes the slow speed and ramps it back up to capacity (I'm on Verizon Fios).

[carmen]

Ceph or AFS may be worth a look-see

[andfarm → carmen]

While Ceph is a cool project (in my heavily biased opinion), it's in a completely different realm from Dropbox.