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
Dropbox using over 4GB of RAM on my M1 Macbook Pro 13"
Dropbox is using over 4GB of RAM on my M1 Macbook Pro 13".
I realise that we are waiting for the native Apple Silicon version, but this is rediculous. I've been using dropbox for more than 10 years, and this is the first time I'm seriously considering to move on. I've seen people complaining about dropbox using 256mb of RAM, at this point that would make me extremely happy. OVER 4GB.....what?????
My M1 Mac mini was showing similar symptoms, although only (!) 1.3 GB. But that's on the low end M1 Mac mini with only 8GB of total memory. Activity Monitor showed memory usage was getting to be amber rather than green. Things were definitely slowing down.
I searched the internet for possible solutions, but eventually it struck me that perhaps Drobox was still an x86 binary and my machine had fired up Rosetta, and the extra memory used by that was being attributed to Rosetta.
So I looked, and there is indeed an M1 build of Dropbox (as a beta).
I signed up for early access, downloaded the beta, installed it, and now Dropbox is only using 1.07GB.... But memory usage is down in the green.
Xcode and its debugger are up to a gigabyte, and Mail.app is using getting on for 45MB, and Safari is eating a bunch too.
But for whatever reason it ** looks** like the M1 dropbox build has reduced the effects of heavy usage.
I assume Dropbox is caching (rather than keeping all necessary data) a bunch of metadata in memory; I'd welcome a means to make this a hierarchical cache (or otherwise get back much of a gigabyte) so I can trade some CPU or file I/O for memory capacity. M1 Macs cannot have their memory increased after purchase, so there really is a memory problem here.
Well I just had my MacMini M1 with 16 GB Ram show Dropbox consuming 46GB (not a typo) of RAM and machine was in amber memory pressure too. This app suffers massive memory leak, a quit and restart got it back to a much more acceptable 280MB and already after around 40mins is back to 328MB, and this isn't counting the 7 Finder extensions consuming 13MB ea too, or the renderers, helpers etc
This machine is only 2months old and was set up from scratch (ie not migrated) so I know I have latest versions of dropbox installed. Hoping there is a fix coming or perhaps need to look at alternates
- Jay
Dropbox Staff
Hi freelancingjim, thanks for contacting us!
How many files do you have in your Dropbox account approximately?
Have you tried reinstalling the app to see if this helps reduce the RAM usage?
I'd also recommend trying out the steps in this article to see if they help.
Keep me updated with any progress!Thank you for the reply. I will have a look through the article. I did reinstall, but I will try again. I have quite a few files, not excessive though, but that was the reason for upgrading to 2TB. I am only using 31.7% of 2TB.
Will have a read through that article and try what it suggests. I pretty sure this is an intel / rosetta 2 issue, at least I hope so. And I hope the new native app is released soon.
Also, most of my files are using selective sync and are on the main supported drive, as mentioned in the article.
