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
Slow upload speeds on Windows 7
I am experiencing the super slow upload speed via Dropbox desktop App ( v 120.4.4598 ) and I am running Windows 7. It used to be good and only recently noticed super slow upload speed. Funny thing is...
Just to let everyone know that the latest Dropbox version has seems to fixed my issue of slow uploads (please refer original post https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Dropbox-files-folders/Does-Dropbox-limit-the-upload-speed-Very-Slow-uploads/m-p/519825 )
I am now getting great upload speeds via Dropbox desktop App. Now my Dropbox desktop app is version 127.4.4265 on Windows 7. As previously mentioned, this issue seems to be on Windows 7 and had problems with v 120.4.4598 .
In conclusion, and evidence by my testing on various devices, it is the Dropbox app that had restricted the upload speed!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Jay please take note.
The reason could be many things. Let's start with the question, was the Ookla speed test server at the same distance as Dropbox's server? The answer to that would be maximum time no as speed test servers are hosted very near to customers in ISP network. They do not give real information like say you have 10Mbps connection, but will you really get 10Mbps once you cross your ISP's network? The answer is NO. No ISP will guarantee that once traffic leaves their network. So thats the connectivity part.
Secondly, it is latency that would be very harsh on data transfer speed. Even if you have 10Gbps connection, you can transfer at very low speeds because of how TCP works (a widely protocol used to transfer data). You can search these terms if you want to understand them in deep: "calculate tcp throughput with latency" or "tcp speed calculator according to delay".
Third, different speeds for different paths. I have seen this in the past many times. In your question, you have not mentioned your actual/bought/committed internet speed. I have seen ISPs who would grant you different speeds based on different destinations. Like, for Google/Youtube, they might have a dedicated connection with them and since they pay for that connection at a almost fixed rate every month, they want to utilise that connection as much as possible. So they provide uncapped/more speeds as compared to the committed speeds. I have seen connections with 10Mbps committed speeds getting 100Mbps on youtube to se videos and on microsoft to download windows/office updates.
So these were some of the reasons you can get different speedtest results. You cannot do apple to apple comparison between different destinations.
If you want to dig deeper into this, we can do that but before that, I would need few more information like whats your committed/bought internet speed, who is your ISP (My experience in networking domain helps me in knowing ISPs behaviour and how their service would be), etc.
@mail3dexter - None of that stuff you're talking about produces a straight line in a graph. It's obvious my upload speed is being governed by some setting.
Basically, uploading to dropbox via the web works as it should (10 MB per second). But uploading via dropbox folder is stuck at 1 MB per second, even after selecting the "do not limit" option. Is that setting broken on Windows 7? Could someone check that on their computer?
