You might see that the Dropbox Community team have been busy working on some major updates to the Community itself! So, here is some info on what’s changed, what’s staying the same and what you can expect from the Dropbox Community overall.

Forum Discussion

anuragrb's avatar
anuragrb
New member | Level 2
2 years ago

Extremely slow downloads and views

I have an extremely fast gigabit connection, and can download from most websites at near about 100MB/s. However, when I try to download folders from Dropbox, it barely downloads at 1 MB/s if I'm lucky. This seems to be something new since I was able to download some content a couple of weeks ago at the speed I'd expect to be able to. Is my account being throttled or something? Even views of the content in these folders are slow, with each image taking minutes to load at a time.

  • Danny13's avatar
    Danny13
    Helpful | Level 5

    I do not know if this is your problem, but I suffered the same for weeks and what I found was that I’d switched on smart sync or something like that, and given authority to sync thousands of files to my laptop in the background. It did what you described and I couldn’t then immediately sync files I had just added, as it was busy syncing thousands of others and took ages to sync just a couple of files very slow. 

    • anuragrb's avatar
      anuragrb
      New member | Level 2

      Unfortunately not. To make things weirder, sometimes the speed will burst up to the max bandwidth of my connection and then go back down to below 1 MB/s. It really feels like some weird form of throttling.

      • Hannah's avatar
        Hannah
        Icon for Dropbox Staff rankDropbox Staff

        Hey Peter M.42, I understand you're referring to the desktop app and not the website.

         

        Can you check the Dropbox application preferences, to make sure the bandwidth used is not limited?

  • Megan's avatar
    Megan
    Icon for Dropbox Staff rankDropbox Staff

    Hi anuragrb, let's jump right into this! 

     

    If I understand this correctly, you're using the website in order to download your content, and preview some of your files when you notice the slow downloads, am I right? 

     

    Your account shouldn't be throttled, as this isn't something that happens with specific Dropbox accounts, unless the site is down for everyone. Do you use a specific browser when this happens? 

     

    If I were you, I'd try to use a different browser, clear the cache and use an incognito tab on my current one, just to see if the behavior there is the same. Can you give it a go?

     

    Keep me posted!

    • Peter M.42's avatar
      Peter M.42
      Explorer | Level 4

      Yes!!! Extremely slow since a few months and more slow to not usable since the update for Mac-Ventura (moving DropBox to a secure place ... BS!!). No network activity by DropBox FileProvider for 20-30 minutes, than 1-3 minutes activity and no activity for again 20-30 minutes.

      I need my files offline, the online is the default what makes me angry.

      Waiting for 10GB since 4 hours now. Not usable.

  • Gene Wayne's avatar
    Gene Wayne
    Explorer | Level 3

    Hello! I faced this problem, Dropbox does not upload one video file (10-30 GB) faster than 15-25 megabits per second, although my upload speed is 100 megabits per second. If I upload a file to Dropbox Replay, the speed there is about 80-100 megabits per second.

    • Hannah's avatar
      Hannah
      Icon for Dropbox Staff rankDropbox Staff

      Hey Gene Wayne, thanks for letting us know about this.

       

      If you quit the Dropbox app and then relaunch it, do you see any difference in behavior?

      • Gene Wayne's avatar
        Gene Wayne
        Explorer | Level 3

        Hi Hannah !
        Restarted, nothing has changed. This has been for a long time, It didn't bother me before, but now I work with large video files and it is very unpleasant. Dropbox Transfer and Dropbox Web also upload 20-25 megabits per second, but Dropbox Replay, Frame.IO,  MEGA upload almost 100 megabits.

        Recently, I had to use another service (MASV) to transfer the file faster, screenshot below.

    • HREP's avatar
      HREP
      Explorer | Level 3

      After using Dropbox daily to deliver our company's product to our clients, we have been experiencing extremely slow upload speeds just recently.  I've checked all my settings (haven't changed anything on my PC, as far as I know), and I've googled everything under the sun.  I can't find anything on my end that is not set to optimize upload speeds.  Yet, I am experiencing times when it might take 2 hours to upload what should take less than a minute.  Is there something new going on with Dropbox?  If this persists, I will find it necessary to cancel our account and use a different cloud service, so can someone please help?  (Support personnel had no solution, when I called them)

      • Hannah's avatar
        Hannah
        Icon for Dropbox Staff rankDropbox Staff

        Hey HREP, thanks for reaching out to us.

         

        I moved your post to this relevant thread, so be sure to check it for any info that might seem helpful to you.

         

        Also, can you please give us the ticket number for your communication with our support team, so we can look into it?

  • HREP's avatar
    HREP
    Explorer | Level 3

    Timing is the same as in my situation.  I have checked all of the settings, and I can't find anything that would explain it with the setup.  Looking for Dropbox to identify and address the problem.  My subscription comes up for renewal in a couple of months, and I'm already making the transition to another data delivery service, out of immediate necessity.

About View, download, and export

Need support with viewing, downloading, and exporting files and folders from your Dropbox account? Find help from the Dropbox Community.

Need more support

If you need more help you can view your support options (expected response time for an email or ticket is 24 hours), or contact us on X or Facebook.

For more info on available support options for your Dropbox plan, see this article.

If you found the answer to your question in this Community thread, please 'like' the post to say thanks and to let us know it was useful!