Dropbox will kill your insane MacBook Air 2013 battery • Hacker News Board

Re: Dropbox will kill your insane MacBook Air 2013 battery

#51

Post by andor » Wed, Jul 03, 2013, 10:27 AM UTC

mtts wrote: post #9

tluyben2 wrote: post #6

I see this problem happening only to me when it's used as code repository. Which is what he is doing. I had that for one project because the client didn't want to use git, but it's horrible. So, logically, when you have a lot of files changing all the time (compiling (xcode, eclipse), adding libraries (node, RoR)) you'll see dropbox taking over your computer. For all other uses it seems fine. Note also that when you…

Well, yes, but if you read the result of his tests even with syncing turned off Dropbox is still eating about 500 mAh. And that is, I would say, rather strange.

I guess the Python interpreter is preventing the CPU from entering lower sleep states.

Re: Dropbox will kill your insane MacBook Air 2013 battery

#52

Post by 9h1d9j809s » Wed, Jul 03, 2013, 10:29 AM UTC

zurn wrote: post #31

Laptop operating systems need to start keeping tabs on what's using your battery, like Android does (with mixed success but that's another story).

OS X 10.9 does show battery use per app in the Activity Monitor. It also shows a short list of battery-draining apps right in the battery menu at the top of the screen.

Re: Dropbox will kill your insane MacBook Air 2013 battery

#53

Post by chrisdevereux » Wed, Jul 03, 2013, 10:30 AM UTC

throwaway2048 wrote: post #37

threeseed wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dropbox behaves very differently on OSX versus Linux I've found.

likely because linux has inotify

FSEvent/NSFilePresenter APIs do the same on OS X. Nobody should be polling for changes to files.

Re: Dropbox will kill your insane MacBook Air 2013 battery

#54

Post by aidos » Wed, Jul 03, 2013, 10:33 AM UTC

andor wrote: post #46

throwaway2048 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

likely because linux has inotify

Every modern operating system has inotify-like capabilities. Mac OS has an integrated desktop search since 2005, which wouldn't be feasible without filesystem events.

Dropbox has its own process though, doesn't it? dbfseventsd.

sudo fs_usage -w

I've been watching it recently and it seems to touch files that it shouldn't need to. I need to do more investigation. I uninstalled backblaze recently because I discovered that it manually scans the whole filesystem _all the time_.

Re: Dropbox will kill your insane MacBook Air 2013 battery

#55

Post by rickyc091 » Wed, Jul 03, 2013, 10:35 AM UTC

snom380 wrote: post #50

stinos wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

same question here. If you can get free private git repositories on services like bitbucket, it's sort of a mystery to me why one would want to lose true versioning and go with plain backup instead.

You can have both. If you put your working directory in Dropbox you will have a copy of your uncommitted work as well. Also, in many cases it is easier for a graphic designer or just a customer to put stuff in a Dropbox folder that will sync to their website, than uploading stuff using a web form or learning to use git and X amount of deployment tools.

I'm part of the camp that uses both Dropbox / Git for my development work. I've actually had Dropbox save me a few times due to nasty rebases. For a lot of one off scripts, I don't really commit them into git so that's where it comes in handy. The extra redundancy doesn't hurt...

Re: Dropbox will kill your insane MacBook Air 2013 battery

#56

Post by nicoschuele » Wed, Jul 03, 2013, 10:50 AM UTC

TheAnimus wrote: post #36

Oh if only it was one App that killed the battery on the last laptop I bought. Before nuking the default windows install, I did a quick test, with all the crapware that comes as standard, it managed about 4 hours. Fresh install 6.5 hours.

Mac. Doesn't come with crapware.

For Windows boxes, there's decrapifier.

Re: Dropbox will kill your insane MacBook Air 2013 battery

#57

Post by tokenizerrr » Wed, Jul 03, 2013, 11:07 AM UTC

cones688 wrote: post #45

jwr wrote: post #28

Dropbox is terrible with CPU usage. This is something I reported to them several times, but it seems they don't really care. Last I tested, Dropbox consumed CPU for ANY changes ANYWHERE in your filesystem, not just within the Dropbox folder. So its (slow) code processed changes even when you untarred a large set of files somewhere in /tmp. I also stopped using Dropbox for storing my code because of that — it's nearly…

> Another problem with Dropbox is that upon login it indexes the entire Dropbox I haven't used Dropbox in a while as a local client for other reasons but I think people need to appreciate this is the payoff for having the convenience? How can one expect it to sync changes if it never scans or detects changes? People seem to want a magical product where it never uses any HD throughput or CPU to index/scan/upload megab…

Well, just my 2 cents...

The indexation doesn't need to happen immediately upon boot. Do one directory every minute or so, let the computer start up and do other things while your background task runs.

Changes are detected because the operating system notifies dropbox of changes made, they're not continuously scanning the drive. From other comments it sounds like dropbox has registered a hook like that for the entire filesystem, instead of just the working folder. That seems unnecessary.

Re: Dropbox will kill your insane MacBook Air 2013 battery

#58

Post by watson » Wed, Jul 03, 2013, 11:13 AM UTC

Can anyone confirm his findings? I imagine that if this is real, then this is a problem for all MacBook owners not just the latest MacBook Air.

I have a 13" MacBook Air, medio 2011. I bought it almost right after it was released and have used it as my only computer almost every day since. I have the Dropbox agent running all the time.

While working last Sunday I got 5.5 hours of battery life out of it and I've never taken good care of the battery. I never drain it unless I'm not near a power outlet, in which case I just have it plugged in all day.

My current battery health information shows: Cycle Count: 253, Condition: Normal

Re: Dropbox will kill your insane MacBook Air 2013 battery

#59

Post by SurfScore » Wed, Jul 03, 2013, 11:20 AM UTC

davedx wrote: post #38

jwr wrote: post #28

Dropbox is terrible with CPU usage. This is something I reported to them several times, but it seems they don't really care. Last I tested, Dropbox consumed CPU for ANY changes ANYWHERE in your filesystem, not just within the Dropbox folder. So its (slow) code processed changes even when you untarred a large set of files somewhere in /tmp. I also stopped using Dropbox for storing my code because of that — it's nearly…

> And to everyone that says you should not store code in dropbox: a) there are good and legitimate reasons for doing so I'm genuinely curious: why do this, as opposed to using a DVCS like git?

Dropbox revert to previous versions has saved my ass multiple times when something goes wrong in Xcode that I can't undo.

Re: Dropbox will kill your insane MacBook Air 2013 battery

#60

Post by OrdojanAndrius » Wed, Jul 03, 2013, 11:20 AM UTC

Since I'm stuck using an old computer I made a small script that turns Dropbox on every few hours and kills it after 10 minutes. I don't sync data all the time so this solution works well for me and I save system resources.