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Dropbox ignores user's complaints of poor performance for almost a year

dropboxforum.com

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Re: Dropbox ignores user's complaints of poor performance for almost a year

#11

Post by christoph »

rconti wrote: post #7

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.

I have had problems on the Mac and to some extent Windows as well. Generally the fix has been to totally close Dropbox, clear out the Dropbox cache, which is a set of hidden files somewhere (look in their support pages or Google for it) and then re-install the Dropbox application. It more than likely will do a full re-index and this is an absolute pain and CPU hog when it happens. If you have a lot of files, it can day half a day to a full day.

I'm not sure exactly what happens, but my guess is that somehow an index in it's internal database gets corrupted and then it sits in a loop there for some reason whenever it hits that file/folder.

We have used Dropbox extensively in our office across Windows & OSX for at least 2 years and have had this periodically (and randomly) happen on some machines. Although I can't recall it happening in the last 6 months or so.

There was a period where it happened almost fortnightly to someone in the office and we almost swore off Dropbox to something else.

The above has always fixed the issue for us. YMMV.

Re: Dropbox ignores user's complaints of poor performance for almost a year

#12

Post by [deleted] »

shinratdr wrote: post #9

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 Drop…

[deleted]

Re: Dropbox ignores user's complaints of poor performance for almost a year

#16

Post by mtrpcic »

sshykes wrote: post #15

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 :)

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.

Re: Dropbox ignores user's complaints of poor performance for almost a year

#17

Post by mkempe »

powera wrote: post #2

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

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

Re: Dropbox ignores user's complaints of poor performance for almost a year

#18

Post by 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/

[1]: https://www.dropboxforum.com/hc/en-us/community/topics/20021...

Re: Dropbox ignores user's complaints of poor performance for almost a year

#19

Post by codazoda »

rconti wrote: post #7

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.

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.

Re: Dropbox ignores user's complaints of poor performance for almost a year

#20

Post by modoc »

jwr wrote: post #5

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 i…

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.

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