Broccoli: Syncing faster by syncing less (2020) • Hacker News Board

Re: Broccoli: Syncing faster by syncing less (2020)

#21

Post by FractalHQ » Sun, Dec 12, 2021, 10:15 PM UTC

howdydoo wrote: post #16

QuadrupleA wrote: post #14

All this talk of efficiency, yet the Dropbox windows client is such a bloated multi-process memory hog of a mess that I ended up uninstalling it and rigging my own sync with a command line tool (dbxcli), with about 1000x less resource usage. For all this attention to saving their server's resources they sure don't seem to care much about wasting their customers'.

This is classic. "We spent $x million developing a compression algorithm in Rust to slightly speed up a background process in our bloated Electron app!"

With so many Rust engineers, they could get rid of all that Electron bloat with the Rust-based electron alternative, Tauri.

Re: Broccoli: Syncing faster by syncing less (2020)

#22

Post by ChrisArchitect » Sun, Dec 12, 2021, 10:38 PM UTC

What is new here from the conversation a year ago when this was new.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24052002

Re: Broccoli: Syncing faster by syncing less (2020)

#23

Post by kahirsch » Mon, Dec 13, 2021, 12:18 AM UTC

hedgehog wrote: post #20

howdydoo wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is classic. "We spent $x million developing a compression algorithm in Rust to slightly speed up a background process in our bloated Electron app!"

The Electron app wouldn't be an issue if it didn't churn away uselessly even when Dropbox is in the background. The company doesn't care though, their advice was to open a topic in the support forum, to which their response is "This idea will need some more support before we can share it with the team." You can lead a horse to water.

I had a paid subscription but canceled because of their attitude on this. When dropbox.exe can't sync a file because of some file permission or other access problem, it just consumes huge amounts of CPU trying over and over. There is no notification of a problem. There is no log. There is no place in the interface where you can look to see what file is causing the problem or even that there is a problem. You have to just notice the CPU usage.

When I told the support person that this was a problem, he flat out refused to open a ticket or file a bug report. He denied that this was a problem!

That was a couple of years ago, so maybe they have improved since then, but I'll never find out.

Re: Broccoli: Syncing faster by syncing less (2020)

#24

Post by rcarmo » Mon, Dec 13, 2021, 7:35 AM UTC

And yet the Mac client still wakes up whenever I touch files outside my Dropbox folder, and has become a monstrosity full of “UX” I never use (so I switched to other things, and most of my friends to https://github.com/SamSchott/maestral).

Re: Broccoli: Syncing faster by syncing less (2020)

#25

Post by teleforce » Tue, Dec 14, 2021, 4:46 PM UTC

davidjade wrote: post #17

I really wish this idea had become more widespread. Microsoft Research published this 15 years ago. It shipped as part of windows but the paper describes it in enough detail to implement it I think. I got it running years ago and it seemed to work really well. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

Open source implementation of DRC:

https://github.com/zhi3385/openrdc