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Forum Discussion

jeanzbeanz's avatar
jeanzbeanz
Helpful | Level 5
8 years ago

Dropbox not uploading/ uploading v slow

I have dropbox installed on multiple devices and they all work fine, except it has suddenly stopped uploading on my windows laptop. I moved a load of photos off my phone onto dropbox on my laptop l...
Desktop
Sync
upload
Windows
  • Jane's avatar
    Jane
    8 years ago
    Hey walwar, 
     
    Let me send over some more details and tips to determine the cause!
     
    • For starters, you may have a look here for some steps to adjust your bandwidth locally. 
    • Secondly, you could try force quitting all other applications and see if this helps improving your syncing speed. 
    • Also, let me ask you whether you’re in a work or home environment. 
    • You could use the link below to check your connection speed through your ISP and local network by using the following link: http://www.speedtest.net/
     
    I’ll be following-up here, so please keep me updated in your reply! 
Douglas S.'s avatar
Douglas S.
New member | Level 1

I have a 5MB upload hard wired internet. Yet when I upload large files using my desktop application, I'm only getting 10-66kb transfer speeds. Why so slow? My ISP has checked and found nothing wrong with my service. Is Dropbox "throttling back" my upload speed? There are no other devises being used that would reduce band width. Please help!

Dave S.20's avatar
Dave S.20
New member | Level 1
9 years ago

Figured I'd chime in here, not sure if this helps anyone. I did quite a bit of trial and error to finally get my setup working.

Biggest thing: I switched my ISP.

I know: this sucks. But, with standard Comcast I was only getting about 10mb/s upload speeds and for whatever reason Dropbox only seems to utilize about 1-10% of my bandwidth — even when bandwidth settings are at "don't limit". Switching to fiber I was able to get about 60mb/s upload speeds and averaged 5mb/s upload over wifi and would get up to 10 directly plugged in.

Second thing: Limit bandwidth

I can't verify this 100% but it seemed — as others have mentioned — limiting the download rate to like 50kb/s would let the upload speeds thrive. However, I felt like instead of "limit automatically" or "don't limit" I'd actually get better upload speeds when setting an upload limit of around 30,000. Again, can't verify but seemed on average a little better.

Third thing: Energy Saver settings in System Preferences (mac)

Again, there's probably one thing you can do to keep Dropbox syncing while your computer is asleep — or maybe it does automatically? But just to be safe I plugged in my computer and set the Power Adapter settings both to "Never" and unchecked "Power Nap" and "Put hard disks to sleep when possible".

 

All of this is still frustrating and will hopefully be resolved. I am not smart enough to point the blame in any one direction. Still a big fan of Dropbox.

All said and done over 2 nights of letting my computer stay plugged in and active I was able to get 1TB of files uploaded — not too shabby.

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