Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

dropboxforum.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 58 posts

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

#41

Post by shinratdr »

free2rhyme214 wrote: post #24
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…

I think Google is faster at file sync than Dropbox. "Best in class sync" may have been true a few years ago. Then again no one is perfect. I've seen the green check mark missing from all my files in Google Drive at different times. Most of us are complaining about services we use for free.

> I think Google is faster at file sync than Dropbox.

Speed of sync isn't much of a concern to me personally, I don't use Dropbox for big files. Reliability of sync is key for me, and for that I have never had an issue. Everything is everywhere, without exception. No conflicts or corruptions, period.

> Most of us are complaining about services we use for free.

I'll complain about a browser too. "Free" isn't an excuse to offer a crappy product. You're still making money off your userbase somehow.

It's also worth noting that the problems that exist with Dropbox, permiate all tiers. I'll use it, but I'd never pay for a service with so many issues unless I had a very good specific reason. For example, iCloud Sync is way worse but I'll pay for the privilege of being able to dump my iPhone photos online automatically.

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

#42

Post by neckro23 »

I've been bitten by this problem too. What's extra obnoxious about it is that the client used to work just fine -- but a couple years ago it started randomly hogging an entire CPU core for seemingly no reason at all.

I still use it, but Dropbox's refusal to do anything about this problem (or even acknowledge that it exists!) is mostly what's prevented me from taking the leap to a paid account.

It's too bad, because Dropbox's speed, simplicity and (at the time) minimal performance hit was what I originally liked about it compared to other sync solutions. Now it's missing all three.

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

#43

Post by shinratdr »

WillKirkby wrote: post #38
lazy_lizard wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.dropbox.com/gift

"Sorry! Gifting isn’t available in your country yet. Sign up for notifications, and we’ll email you once it’s available."

I got the same message in Canada.

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

#44

Post by dubya »

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…

Regarding Dropbox reacting to changes anywhere in the filesystem: I found that turning off everything under "Import" in preferences seemed to stop it. After that it was perfectly fine on an old 2008 Macbook with spinning disk hard drive. Anecdata, but worth checking.

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

#45

Post by AYBABTME »

ars wrote: post #33
AYBABTME wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

inotify has a limit on how many watches can be held. I don't think that 300k limit is particular to Dropbox, any tool working on the same principle will hit that limit.

They should watch the directory, not the file. The limit is found here: /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches and defaults to 8K, not 300K, so I don't think it's the cause of this problem.

You're right, I was mistaken. The limit is a user limit.

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

#47

Post by wodenokoto »

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…

I haven't used dropbox for a year but it told be specifically not to try and sync git-repos via dropbox when I tried, because it would have performance impact and could result in unexpected behaviour.

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

#48

Post by rconti »

x0x0 wrote: post #30
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.

Me either, but unless the client self-updates I'm running a 3.5 year old client.

It must. I'm running 3.10.11 which the release notes say is the latest. I remember they changed their UI in the OS X menubar icon to be really crappy a couple years ago which I griped about. That's the only way I knew it was updating itself.

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

#49

Post by pimlottc »

zzleeper wrote: post #26
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…

What bothers me about Dropbox is that many of the complaints I had 7 years ago are still there... For instance, I can't exclude folders and extensions, which messes up my workflow a lot (e.g. I can't exclude .git folders)

As a workaround, you can tell git to use a different git-dir folder that's not within the working copy:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/505467/can-i-store-the-gi...

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

#50

Post by RightWingRabble »

benologist wrote: post #27
modoc wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).…

Dropbox = real time, automatic, versioned backup of all files in your entire project, making you and your work safe from deleting files, accidentally overwriting files etc, all the time. Git = not that.

Have you ever tried AeroFS?
Post reply on HN