Dropbox not uploading/ uploading v slow

[jeanzbeanz]

I have dropbox installed on multiple devices and they all work fine, except it has suddenly stopped uploading on my windows laptop.

I moved a load of photos off my phone onto dropbox on my laptop last week and only a handful have uploaded.  The icon in my tray says it is syncing 405 files and has 36 minutes left.

It's definitely not a problem with my bandwidth and I have checked the settings to make sure that dropbox isn't set to a low upload speed.  

I have tried pausing sync and restarting, I have tried closing dropbox and re-opening.  I have also tried restarting my laptop and it uploaded 5 files then stopped again.

I am a pro user and have only used 50% of my available space.

Can anyone help?

[Alexander M.32]

I was just able to solve this slow upload problem for my computer.

Setup: Macbook 13" retina, Xfinity turbo boost internet, Airport Extreme router

Problem: Trying to upload 250GB to Dropbox showed highly variable upload speeds ranging from 1kb/s to 1,600kb/s.  Both Download and Upload Bandwidth settings at the time were set to "No Limit".  Was trying to upload for 3 days continuously with minimal progress.

First Attempt: I changed the Download Bandwidth limit to 150kb/s and kept Upload at No Limit.  Now, upload speeds stay within 1,200 to 1,600kb/s range consistently.  ETA is 26 hours! (Instead of "Grab a Snickers")

Second Attempt: Upload stalled overnight one hour after I went to sleep.  My Macbook Energy Saver Computer Sleep settings were set to Sleep in 1 hour.  I changed that to "Never". (fingers crossed)

FINAL UPDATE - PROBLEM SOLVED!

Uploading to dropbox continuously at speed of 1300 - 1600 kb/s for more than 24 hours.  

SUMMARY OF CHANGES:

Dropbox Bandwidth Preferences: Download Limit set to 150 kb/s.  Upload set to "No Limit"

Macbook Energy Saver Settings: "Computer Sleep" set to "Never" and "Put hard disks to sleep when possible" box was Unchecked.

Hope this helps some of you find peace of mind.

[Dan T.12]

Interesting post, Alexander!
Thanks or sharing.

Tried changing both UL and DL limits to 500KB/s vs "Don't Limit" and then tried to upload the same 2.5MB set of files as before. Then it took 20-25min. This time it was very quick! Either they - or my ISP - have fixed something since then or setting the limits to something other than no limit actually does help. Will probably try 1,000 KB/s limits as well as I have 80dn/10up.

[Jocelyn R.1]

Don't think it is related.  This is what I would call coincidence.

It has been discuss and proven that upload is slow for both, Dropbox client with any settings and Web.

No offense but uploading 2.5MB "very quickly" is not saying much 😉

Maybe Dropbox (just maybe) is finally doing something about this because I have the feeling it has been faster for me also.  

It's just too bad they do not even monitor their own f*****g forum!  For that reason alone I will not be renewing my pro account when it expires.

[Bill A.1]

lol, Jocelyn R. c'mon mate, our complaints are about the speed, which is getting better, so that's great and Dropbox is the best syncing experience to date. But to cancel your account because of the forum is pretty funny. 

[Jocelyn R.1]

Was just kidding... I will cancel for that and many other reasons.  Sucky speed being the main one.

Just uploaded 50MB in 2 minutes using my Gigabit connection so no, it's not getting better after all. At least not for me or not today 😉

[Dan T.12]

I didn't think it would make any difference myself. But my post was because of actual experience already qualified by the potential of it possibly being fixed by Dropbox or the ISP. It worked at the time and that's actually all I care about.

Specifically transfer was approx 2 sec (which I would say is "very quickly" vs about 1,500 sec. for only 2.5MB. Or as much as 750x faster.

If the simple change does work (due to a software glitch no doubt), it may help someone.

HOWEVER - I did an additional test with the old settings (no limits) since (as above) the effect of this was actually unexpected. Performance was also OK now for no limit so it most likely confirms ISP or Dropbox changes/fixes in the interim.

Personally, I will still leave limits at 1,000/1,000 though as that will normally be adequate if actual speeds even reach those limits.

[Thordur J.]

This is like being on an old dial up connection!!! I have tried ADSL, 3G, 4G and Fiberoptic! and it doesn't matter the speed with dropbox is just few kb.

Don't understand why people still use this or even pay for this!! I am going over to Google Drive.

[Dave P.8]

How can Dropbox legally get away with charging customers for such horrible service and then not offer a pro-rated refund when they realize the service is unusable? I tried to upload 24GB of video files to my client, but Dropbox estimated it would take FOUR DAYS!!!! My Hightail account uploads 2GB in less than one hour, but that account will only accept files 2GB or less in size. Thus, I thought a "Pro" Dropbox account was the solution. After "dropping" $99 on a yearly subscription and wasting 2 hours of upload (only 134MB completed in TWO HOURS), I canceled my subscription, only to find that Dropbox won't honor a refund. This is piracy. 

[Bill A.1]

I just wanted to say, I think Dropbox speeds are improving again. I recently synced a new computer and the speed was very reasonable. I was syncing to Google Drive at the same time and it took much longer to sync the same files to Google Drive.

One other thing I wanted to add is, now that I'm on a newer/faster computer, I think Dropbox processes files much faster which helps with uploading them faster. On my old machine, the system would lag a lot while Dropbox was processing new files. 

[Conor k.]

For the record, with a 2Gbps down/ 1Gbps up fiber connection running on a 2013 mac pro here in Tokyo, My upload speeds are hovering around 25Mbps. (I get roughly double this speed when uploading to amazon cloud drive via their desktop app). When using speed test on a regional server I regularly get over 900Mbps each way (my Gigabit ethernet to the modem is the bottleneck on the down stream). Even when connecting to a server in Palo Alto I get around 500Mbps up/750mbps down (though the ping is admittedly about 10 times longer).
http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/4870575906
Even if connecting to California were much slower, now that you have an office in Tokyo, I'd suggest that lack of global infrastructure on DropBox's part (read: servers in east Asia) won't really hold water, particularly when you're trying to attract clients in such a well connected part of the world.

To the dropbox team, if utilizing 1/20th of upstream bandwidth, and and being half as fast as the dismally slow competition is  where you intend to be then I guess there's not much need to discuss things further, but I think the frustration in this thread is because customers love everything else about the product so much, it's a shame to have it handicapped this way.

I concede there are a lot of variables, but I think it's safe to say most of the people who have gotten all the way to page three of this thread have already double checked their bandwidth limiter settings in drop box and know what their ISP's upstream is. You dove a slightly deeper on your post back in *August* so let me dress some of those points:

August 28, 2015 17:03

- the desktop application's bandwidth settings (what speed you choose for the upload/download limits)

>we’ve all checked this… no limits either way (the fact that limits are all denoted in kbps speaks volumes in itself)

- your geographic location, particular ISP, and service plan

>Tokyo… probably the fastest internet city in the world after Seul, Sonet Nuro, 2^bps down/1Gbps up

- the route your ISP provides between your computer and Dropbox servers.

>a little hard for me to determine since you didn’t tell us where those are, but assuming you have some in the bay area, the ping is 139ms, and transfer speeds are in the 500Mbps~750Mbps range

It's also important to distinguish between the speed your ISP advertises (typically the maximum possible, not an in-practice average) and the speed "speed tests" report (usually calculated using the speed test server located closest to your geographic location) 

> see above

from the actual speed of the ISP-provided route between your computer and Dropbox servers. If you are far away from the Dropbox servers, if the route of the connection to the server suffers from congestion,

>see above  

if you're using wi-fi or ethernet cables,

>direct Gigabit ethernet on less than 10 meters of CAT6e.

there’s a lot of things that could explain why you experience slow speed.

>and SOME of those things are DropBox’s responsibility

Additionally, most consumer ISPs provide 1/10th the upload speed compared to advertised download speed and some ISPs may throttle sustained connections.

>not in here.

Two things that could be relevant as well:

- The speed the Dropbox app is showing is an aggregated speed of hashing, indexing and uploading so it also depends on your computer performances for example.

>The speed istat menus shows is absolute bandwidth utilization

> Mac Pro D700 with 4xPCie SSD, 32Gb of Ram and 6core multithreading processor DB is utilizing 48% of one of the cores

- The speed the client is displaying is in KBps (kilo bytes per sec) while ISPs (and speed tests) often display speed in Mbps (Mega bits per sec) it means that you have to multiply Dropbox' speed by  125 to compare it with the ISP's/speed tests.

>thanks for the reminder but we’re apples to apples here… (X)bps

Unfortunately, we cannot diagnose speed issues based on speedtests such as the ones you can find on the internet, but a good thing to check to dive deeper, would be to try to upload two files of the same size; one via the website and one via the desktop application (one at a time).

>I think we’ve already done a lot of the user-end diagnosis for you, so at this point that’s not really what this thread is about. It’s about you acknowledging what you expect the upper limit of performance to be on your backend servers.

If the upload via the website is way faster than via the desktop application, I'd definitely recommend writing in to support at https://www.dropbox.com/support and let us know the exact name of the files you tested.

>given the 10GB file size cap, web upload doesn’t always help, but it’s nice to know that’s your criterion for bypassing some of the newB support questionnaire.

So if after over 6 plus months of this thread there's no "fix" perhaps it's reasonable to assume that this is a feature, rather than a bug. So to the folks at DropBox, could you tell us in the best case scenario.. with a hypothetical customer with google fiber and living just down the street from your server farm... what kind of performance do you expect to deliver? I'm willing to chalk up say a 50% performance hit due to distance, but if someone on google fiber just down the block from you getting a 50Mbps upload actually sounds good to you, just tell us that so we can move on. If that seems below your own expectations, then as others have suggested, I think you have some work to do.