Dropbox ignores user's complaints of poor performance for almost a year
1–10 of 58 posts
Re: Dropbox ignores user's complaints of poor performance for almost a year
#2More accurate: "people keep piling into a bug thread about one symptom with many possible causes for over a year".
Re: Dropbox ignores user's complaints of poor performance for almost a year
#3I have to keep it closed 1/2 the time, which makes it a terrible solution for multi-device syncing and sharing files. All this in addition to laughably primitive functionality! The worst part is I pay for nothing to ever improve.
Re: Dropbox ignores user's complaints of poor performance for almost a year
#4On Windows, Dropbox has a global file watch and does filtering to determine if the files should be synced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9136546
Re: Dropbox ignores user's complaints of poor performance for almost a year
#5Dropbox 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 inside your Dropbox will also cause performance problems. Which means that paying for extra space (I do) isn't that useful if you intend to keep your git repos with source code there.
It has been like that for years, the company has made little progress performance-wise (instead we got useless things like photo-something-or-other-that-tries-to-access-my-photos).
I learned to live with it, because the advantages of Dropbox outweigh the disadvantages of a poor implementation. Dropbox is still a very good product, even if you have to pay a hefty price in CPU and battery life for it. I dream that one day someone will decide that performance is a goal worth pursuing and finally optimize the thing.
Re: Dropbox ignores user's complaints of poor performance for almost a year
#6Dropbox is literally the worst app on my MacBook Air. It's such a POS, it blows my mind that Dropbox can suck so hard on a platform as important as OS X.
I had to give up syncing some parts, because the problems would create a bevy of file conflicts.
Re: Dropbox ignores user's complaints of poor performance for almost a year
#7Wow, 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.
Re: Dropbox ignores user's complaints of poor performance for almost a year
#8I've been noticing poor performance too, in addition to some weird bugs. I've had files completely disappear, the response from support is attached below. I still don't have those files back, they were not critical but now I have learned to use dropbox for (slow) syncing between machines, and use an external drive for redundancy.
Support response:
The event you've provided shows and deletion of 12 files as well as an addition of 12 files. When this happens in the exact same event, it is due to a move or to renaming a folder 99% of the time.
To recover your correct previous versions of these files, you may be able to rename the folder back to exactly what is what named prior.
Re: Dropbox ignores user's complaints of poor performance for almost a year
#9Poor 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 Dropbox is still infuriating.
Re: Dropbox ignores user's complaints of poor performance for almost a year
#10Typical Dropbox...
I've been bugging them about a solution to the file limit for at least a year with no response. I finally got a (public) response by tweeting at them. They said they would follow up with me and they never did. Even a "we can't fix this" would be better than the dead air I've received.
I really don't know how they intend to compete with the software giant's similar offerings if it's not via superior customer service.
For anyone not aware of the file count issue you cannot have more than ~300,000 files on dropbox before it totally falls apart. I was paying for 1TB of storage and using about 3% of it when it totally stopped syncing.