We're making changes to the Community, so you may have received some notifications - thanks for your patience and welcome back. Learn more here.
Forum Discussion
Desktop App Severely Affecting System Performance
I love Dropbox. I can't say I've messed around with a bunch of different cloud storage services, but Dropbox has been more or less great for me for years. However, recently the desktop application ha...
This sounds exactly like my issue. Things are slow because Dropbox is totally thrashing the registry. Right-clicking on the desktop (or opening the Start Menu) requires checking a few dozen registry entries, but Dropbox's indexing causes a kind of denial-of-service attack on the Windows registry.
Dropbox support was pretty cool when we started talking offline and we were able to track it down to Windows being the real troublemaker. When Dropbox checks a file during re-sync, it sends out a request to Windows to update the little icon in the corner (green checkmark, etc.).
Historically, this was fine. Maybe(?) after the latest Windows 10 update (that's my guess; the Dropbox team reported they haven't been able to reproduce the behavior), that exact same "hey, Windows, update that file's icon" request now involves checking the registry for four values, which ends up closer to thirty actual registry operations. Who knows why. Windows doesn't seem to cache the values, so it repeats the check for every file. And Dropbox seems to update the whole folder hierarchy's icons each time (despite alleged "deduplicating logic"), so you end up with something close to 150 registry calls per file in your Dropbox!
No known workaround.
All we'd need is an "I don't want icon overlays" option in Dropbox and this problem would disappear. Alternatively: Windows could fix its broken code.
My first thought is Google Drive as I already use so many of the services in their ecosystem (Gmail, GSuite, Calendar, etc) as do many of my clients.
But I need to take a look at the playing field myself and assess what is available, pricing, ease of use, etc
But I need to take a look at the playing field myself and assess what is available, pricing, ease of use, etc
BTW:
My Dropbox issues have accelerated and become worse. A client sent me 8gig worth of files. Normally, sure, it would take a bit of time to synch, etc., but she sent these a WEEK AGO and even though I "moved" both of her files to "selective synch" (making them almost useless for me, by the way), my dropbox is STILL SYNCHING and the latest is, it's going to now take 24 hours--HOURS--to synch 107 (small) files.
This has gone from the sublime to the ridiculous. I've never had such horrible problems with this app. Another client sent me a 3.5 gig file today, and I can't download it to DB. It's absolutely impossible; I won't be synched for a MONTH at this rate.
Dropbox--my entire company has run on your app. Myself, all my employees, etc. and now, you're not just losing MY teeny-weeny 3TB account business, but my 25 employees' too. I pay for their individual dropboxes, each year, and I **bleep** sure won't now. This is ABSURD and I am so angry I could scream. To have a DB that hasn't synched in over a WEEK! When I removed the "big files" that were apparently clogging it up? (and, btw, I removed tens of thousands of files and did it do anything? NO!).
Unbelievable how you could screw up a product that worked GREAT. What on earth were you thinking?
SO frustrated.
And they marked the issue Solved. I don't think so.
- Lusil
Dropbox Staff
Hey everyone, apologies for missing your replies and thank you for nudging me back.
If you're still having issues with your computer experiencing an overall slow-down, could you have a look at this article and let me know if any of the suggestions mentioned there apply to you?
Let me know what you find, thanks!
I'm not sure what's going on, but DropBox this past year has been ridiculously slow.
And this is with an upgraded computer (3900x, 64GB DDR4 RAM, Phison 16 PCiE NVMe SSDs with crazy fast write/read speeds and Fios up/download speeds). And yes, I checked all my settings and re-downloaded the application.
When I use the application on my desktop, DropBox is just VERY SLOW when browsing and accessing files (compared to 2017-2018 DropBox on my OLDER computer!). I can't open them in a Windows explorer window or Mac folder window as I previously could in 2018-early2019. Please somehow get us back to that previous version of DropBox. We want that easy drag-and-drop-into-folder-window DropBox that we liked so much before we subscribed to it.
