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Dropbox will kill your insane MacBook Air 2013 battery

blog.nicoschuele.com

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Re: Dropbox will kill your insane MacBook Air 2013 battery

#11

Post by bherms »

I had this happen in the past too and found it to be the result of two issues:

1) Using dropbox to house a very large git repo with massive changes and tons of branches... Every time I switched branches, the hundreds of files would change and obviously kick off a major sync job.

2) There were a few files in a folder than had the owner set to the wrong owner and Dropbox couldn't get permission to access them. This caused it to get stuck in a loop trying to sync those files and Dropbox ended up running my CPU up to over 100% load.

Fix those issues and you shouldn't see it causing any more problems with your battery life.

Re: Dropbox will kill your insane MacBook Air 2013 battery

#12

Post by da_maire »

I have a cron script running on my MacBook to make sure the Dropbox client priority is always set to 20 (lowest). I also pause the client manually when moving to battery power. I really wish there was a better solution, like switching to a similar service that offers decent (or at least acceptable) software, but almost everyone else uses the same setup with terrible 'universal' Java/Python/etc-based clients that absolutely suck at synchronizing large amounts of data.

Re: Dropbox will kill your insane MacBook Air 2013 battery

#13

Post by easytiger »

bherms wrote: post #11

I had this happen in the past too and found it to be the result of two issues: 1) Using dropbox to house a very large git repo with massive changes and tons of branches... Every time I switched branches, the hundreds of files would change and obviously kick off a major sync job. 2) There were a few files in a folder than had the owner set to the wrong owner and Dropbox couldn't get permission to access them. This cau…

> Using dropbox to house a very large git repo with massive changes and tons of branches... Every time I switched branches, the hundreds of files would change and obviously kick off a major sync job.

I really have to say honestly: no shit. Sorry if i sound crass but really? When you use an arbitrary piece of software to automatically modify 100s of files the piece of software designed to detect that exact event has do do work and you are complaining? The mind boggles

Re: Dropbox will kill your insane MacBook Air 2013 battery

#14

Post by InclinedPlane »

bherms wrote: post #11

I had this happen in the past too and found it to be the result of two issues: 1) Using dropbox to house a very large git repo with massive changes and tons of branches... Every time I switched branches, the hundreds of files would change and obviously kick off a major sync job. 2) There were a few files in a folder than had the owner set to the wrong owner and Dropbox couldn't get permission to access them. This cau…

Try this: separate out the git directory from the working directory so that the working directory is not in dropbox but the git directory is. That might solve some of your problems.

E.g.: git --git-dir=/home/me/dropbox/git/proj --work-tree=/home/me/proj init

Re: Dropbox will kill your insane MacBook Air 2013 battery

#15

Post by rasmuskl »

One solution to the whole "storing source in dropbox" problem that I liked to use previously (using bitbucket now instead) is just to have a bare git repo in dropbox + the real checkout somewhere else and just push commits to the bare dropbox repo whenever I'm about to switch machine. Could even be set up to happen more automagically since the repo isn't shared.

Syncing binaries (I mainly work in C#) and lots of small changes seems silly to me.

Re: Dropbox will kill your insane MacBook Air 2013 battery

#18

Post by raverbashing »

bherms wrote: post #11

I had this happen in the past too and found it to be the result of two issues: 1) Using dropbox to house a very large git repo with massive changes and tons of branches... Every time I switched branches, the hundreds of files would change and obviously kick off a major sync job. 2) There were a few files in a folder than had the owner set to the wrong owner and Dropbox couldn't get permission to access them. This cau…

Don't use dropbox to solve a solved problem: git backups should go to another git "server" (like bitbucket or github)

But yes, the dropbox client devs should go through these bugs and hopefully fix them

Re: Dropbox will kill your insane MacBook Air 2013 battery

#19

Post by maikhoepfel »

The only takeaway is that his power usage shouldn't be that high with Dropbox idling/paused. But given that he's * surprised at it using a lot of power when doing the initial sync * decided to have a git repo inside Dropbox (just don't do it, you will run into trouble; and it will cause heavy sync activity, thus waking CPU and wifi) * using a unit of capacity to express power consumption

I'm not sure I trust his methods.

I regularly turn off Dropbox on and off when switching between mobile broadband and wifi, and haven't seen any difference in power consumption. That's on Ubuntu 13.04 @ Thinkpad T530.

Re: Dropbox will kill your insane MacBook Air 2013 battery

#20

Post by adamors »

omarrr wrote: post #4

> I use it to store my code repository [...] Not using Dropbox is not an option for me as I switch machines several times during the day. I'd suggest you invest in a hosted git repo.

No need really. Bitbucket offers an unlimited number of private repos, it's ideal for this stuff.
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