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 <i>not synced</i> to your computer will still cause Dropbox to consume CPU.<p>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.<p>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).<p>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.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>Interesting thread.
I'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.<p>Support response:<p>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.<p>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.
On Windows, Dropbox has a global file watch and does filtering to determine if the files should be synced: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9136546" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9136546</a>
Typical Dropbox...<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
I use Dropbox to sync my ~/Sites folder in OS X, between my three macs. It works.... Except when it can't figure out a conflict and creates CONFLICTED copies of git object, refs, head files. Quickly turns into a nightmare.<p>CONFLICTED copies in Dropbox drives me absolutely nuts, and should not happen since I never edit the files concurrently.
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].<p>[0]: <a href="https://blogs.dropbox.com/mailbox/" rel="nofollow">https://blogs.dropbox.com/mailbox/</a><p>[1]: <a href="https://www.dropboxforum.com/hc/en-us/community/topics/200211215-Mailbox?sort_by=recent_activity" rel="nofollow">https://www.dropboxforum.com/hc/en-us/community/topics/20021...</a>
Dropbox 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.<p>I had to give up syncing some parts, because the problems would create a bevy of file conflicts.
Definitely something I'd like to see fixed. What I find crazy about that thread, and something I would find unacceptable is how many people on that forum basically using it as a means to advertise for the competition (Google Drive.)<p>Not saying that shouldn't be allowed, but you'd think the community manager would make it a point to take that feature right to the dev team. I know its not an easy fix, but definitely something that would immediately satisfy a large group of users.<p>Not to mention from a 'green' perspective the amount of CPU cycles, Wi-Fi packets, etc that could be saved from fixing this.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
I find this very strange, as the major file synchronization client that I work on doesn't have this problem. We use the fsevents API, and it's pretty localized to the folders we monitor.<p>(I will admit that we have performance issues when users sync more than 100,000 files; but that's more due to fundamental limits of what you can do in a user-mode application.)<p>Perhaps Dropbox is just trying to trap deleting / moving / renaming the Dropbox folder? That's something that's tricky to do; and we had to disable our technique to do it because it had too many side effects.
I've had my public links blocked for three years. The reason? "Temporarily blocked due to too much traffic". 3 years is temporary huh? I have even tried emailing support. No response.
I use Seafile, I've not looked at how secure it is, so I only store non-sensitive stuff on it. Its not a "Dropbox but better", its different with different controls. I use to to selectively sync folders, and preference files. Other than that I can't really say much, the mobile app shat itself last time I tried to back up photos (~2 months ago). Its wobbly, but I still prefer it over Dropbox at the moment.
Dropbox's energy performance vs. Google Drive:<p><a href="http://imageshack.com/a/img908/1838/YHDwZ6.png" rel="nofollow">http://imageshack.com/a/img908/1838/YHDwZ6.png</a><p>I only keep Dropbox because they automatically stick my screenshots in a folder and sync it.
I 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.
And they're still the only one that works worth a damn on Linux and Windows. So sadly, I'm still using them.<p>Though, I've never, ever had a perf problem with it.
Do any good people even work at Dropbox?<p>I submitted my resume years ago and never heard back. I wonder who they hired instead..<p>Other than Guido, of course :)