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Dropbox: Going Deeper with Project Infinite

blogs.dropbox.com

11–20 of 95 posts

Re: Dropbox: Going Deeper with Project Infinite

#11
post #2

Thanks to dropbox inifit I discovered Infinit.sh - http://infinit.sh/ which I got really excited about. I wonder what is their experience with using FUSE and DOKANY..

I have a similar success story. Thanks to Dropbox spamming me with "OMG UPGRADE!" every time I clicked anything, I found out about SyncThing (specifically SyncTrayzor for Windows).

Thanks, Dropbox!

Re: Dropbox: Going Deeper with Project Infinite

#13

As a paying Pro customer, I am a bit worried how intent they seem to be on pushing the business/enterprise products. First of all, Dropbox the web application is spammed with Dropbox Business advertising. I am already paying. And, no, my employer (a European university) is unlikely to roll out Dropbox Business. So please stop bugging me :(. Secondly, more and more features are rolled out to business users first. Why?…

Businesses pay more, and there is enough free competition for dropbox. It makes sense if they want to make a profit.

Re: Dropbox: Going Deeper with Project Infinite

#14
post #12

So..the cost of an extra kernel/userspace switch was too much for a file request that is going to be serviced by a server on the other side of the internet?..really?

Pretty much, it's not going to matter: http://www.csl.sri.com/users/gehani/papers/SAC-2010.FUSE.pdf.

Putting ext3 into userspace led to slightly less than 10% performance degradation on postmark. Fuse really isn't an issue in most cases, and I can't imagine that this makes a huge difference on most workloads.

Re: Dropbox: Going Deeper with Project Infinite

#15

As a paying Pro customer, I am a bit worried how intent they seem to be on pushing the business/enterprise products. First of all, Dropbox the web application is spammed with Dropbox Business advertising. I am already paying. And, no, my employer (a European university) is unlikely to roll out Dropbox Business. So please stop bugging me :(. Secondly, more and more features are rolled out to business users first. Why?…

>First of all, Dropbox the web application is spammed with Dropbox Business advertising. I am already paying.

Aren't those who are "already paying" the most likely to upgrade? Maybe not you or not your institution, but most.

It starts with a few people at a business, and then they update to a business account.

Re: Dropbox: Going Deeper with Project Infinite

#16
post #3

So instead of using a FS shim to userspace on security grounds they decided to distribute a custom kext that's closed source -- ie a great way for normal bugs to turn into dangerous ones? I'm not sure I understand the logic here

Exactly, we should be moving in the opposite direction: make as much software as possible user-space and sandboxed. I assume a party as large as Dropbox can request Apple to extend the APIs where necessary?

>I assume a party as large as Dropbox can request Apple to extend the APIs where necessary?

As large? Dropbox is like a fly to Apple. Not to mention competitors. And they haven't budged for much larger parties.

So, unless it's something that Apple intends to do anyway, Dropbox's request will don't have much success.

Re: Dropbox: Going Deeper with Project Infinite

#17
I'm a bit scared to figure out what this means for my users scanning their hard drives with Space Gremlin. I go through standard file apis to scan all the folders on the users system. Will it end up scanning the entire users online filesystem and not just the actual local files? Will getting file meta data on all those online files end up causing a fetch to DB and grind the whole scan to a halt?

I've been resisting building a custom HFS+ reader for years but apples expanded use of hard links plus whatever DB is about to unleash might require a new approach.

Re: Dropbox: Going Deeper with Project Infinite

#18
post #2

Thanks to dropbox inifit I discovered Infinit.sh - http://infinit.sh/ which I got really excited about. I wonder what is their experience with using FUSE and DOKANY..

Is there any way to incorporate this into iOS or Android so that you can backup to your infinite drive instead of iCloud or Google Drive?

Re: Dropbox: Going Deeper with Project Infinite

#19
post #5

I suppose "deeper" also being the strategic direction they're taking with this?

For a real "deeper" blog they could have given us some benchmarks comparing good implementations on FUSE and kernel space. They instead gave a meaningless diagram to argue about performance. Toward closed source binary kernel blob they go, and out I jump.
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