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Forum Discussion
fort
7 years agoNew member | Level 2
High CPU usage even when not syncing or indexing
For the past couple of days, Dropbox has been consistently using around 30% of my CPU, when not syncing or indexing anything (i.e., the menu bar drop down says `Up to date`). Any idea why this might ...
- 7 years agoHi there, most likely you have symlinks in your Dropbox folder. You can see what they are by following step 7 in this article.Otherwise, the rest of the steps should also help find out what’s causing the CPU usage.
Jay
Dropbox Staff
Hi there, most likely you have symlinks in your Dropbox folder. You can see what they are by following step 7 in this article.
Otherwise, the rest of the steps should also help find out what’s causing the CPU usage.
fort
7 years agoNew member | Level 2
Thanks, Jay. I do have symlinks in my Dropbox folder, but they've been there for years, and this problem only started yesterday. They're there because they link to files that can only be synced by a different service (OmniPresence), so it's the only way of keeping all my project files organised and 'together' on Dropbox.
Still, if that's what's really causing the CPU usage to spike, I'll have to work out some other solution.
- pikatchum6 years agoNew member | Level 2
'you have symlinks' is dropbox's way to tell you 'our app sucks, so we give you a canned answer'
The symlink issue could be solved in a minute with 3 lines of code by simply NOT FOLLOWING them, a child can understand this, and yet they won't do that.. why? because then they have no excuse for all the problems their app creates.
Recently, I complained about the app replacing a file I was working on with a copy of that file they had online, somewhere, which was 3 weeks older!!! They put my good file on the side and renamed it 'conflicted etc' and proudly replaced it with the old file. Without any warning! When I complained about that, guess what was the answer? "It's the symlinks"... it's their swiss army knife for all problems.
It's simply impossible to work without symlinks or remove them: there are inside applications, inside my python development environment, even inside their own .dropbox.cache. And yet they dare to ask you to remove them all.
When I used automator to search for those conflicted files, I found out in horror there were 150 of them... They do this behind your back with zero warning. I had to painstakingly go through them one by one and fix it.
- jacanterbury5 years agoNew member | Level 2
my oldish asus windows 10 laptop kept getting 100% cpu/disk acces and regularly crashing. uninstalling Dropbox seems to have fixed all the problems.
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