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
Mac slows down on starting with paid Dropbox.
I have to wait on my macs (27" and two 13" Macbook, three and four years old, newest systems) almost 10 to 15 Minutes until i can use other apps, as dropbox syncs so slow the list. After list is load...
Hello Jane,
I am sorry for not getting back after your detailed response.
I do use the System Monitor, but I couldn't put my finger on an instance when Dropbox itself (i.e. a process that clearly relates to Dropbox) would be hogging the CPU. I could see that the disk read / writes was pretty high, but I can't provide a good set of numbers. (That was part of why I never got back, I was hoping in vain to have the time to collect some numbers.)
It looks more like an issue of the way Dropbox and the the Mac's other processes (in particular, mds_stores which relates to Spotlight) interact.
In other developments, I enabled smart sync, and it sems a bit better (upgrading the memory to 64Gb might have helped, too). I do have a lot of files (2 million) but am only using a fraction of the total storage.
My ongoing peeve is that yep, that initial slow-down is still there. The mac is unusable for a few minutes. The other issue that is annoying is that Dropbox seems to spend a lot of time updating folders that I haven't touched for years. As a result, changes in files I do update don't propagate for a long time and I end up with lots of forked versions and occasionally lose work I thought I had saved.
I don't understand how the "sync this file first" feature is supposed to work. Having to click on them one by one by hand kind of defeats the purpose of cloud storage, doesn't it? I run simulations that generate many outputs. I have versions of papers that I want my coworkers to see. I have class folders with subfolders for each student, with further subfolders for their homeworks, etc. etc.
Yes, I could be more organized with my files, and perhaps take old folders off of Dropbox or stop syncing them. But that would require spending a long time sifting through years worth of stuff... again , I thought the point of cloud storage was that (1) it is available on different machines and (2) you don't have to decide what to do with old folders due to lack of capacity.
New Mackbook Pro 15inch 2.6GHz with dropbox installed = no more issues with dropbox hogging HDD resources. The SSD is so fast now that I do not even notice the difference anymore. I was unable to use dropbox on the 2011 Macbook Pro or 2011 iMAC 27 inch computer anymore due to the way it uses HDD resources. It was a $3K fix, but fix nonetheless.
It is not a solution. In a year or so, you will be back where you started. Dropbox is and have a top tier membership version which I am giving up because of this. I am sick of it.
