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 y...
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
- Nancy
Dropbox Staff
Hi Galaxy3, I hope you’re doing well and I’m sorry to hear about the issue.
Can you please check what’s the current syncing status of your desktop app, as well as its app version?
Please let me know these details, and we’ll look into this further.
Thanks for reply, and sorry for my late reply.
The sync status is active and up to date with no errors and the app version is the latest as downloaded when this machine (M1 based MacMini) was rolled out couple weeks ago (but version number is 162.4.5419)
FWIW when you quit the application and then restart it the usage plummets, as do the processes running as well. See attached. Smallest usage and process allocation from a fresh launch of dropbox - this is ant after a restart, then after a relatively short period more processes and more RAM, then after a few days massive increase in processes and RAM usage
