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?

[Douglas S.]

Are you guys direct uploading to the website? Or are you, as I was, dragging my files to the Dropbox folder on my computer? I found that speeds increased tremendously when I uploaded to the website and let my computer sync to that. I'm not getting 5 gigabytes but it's faster.

[Jeff N.3]

Download speeds aren't anything to mess your pants about either. 5MB/s on 15MB/s connection. Not exactly what you would expect for a paid service. I've also noticed on my laptop that the crypt and compress operations are maxing out a single core, and not even utlizing the other cores. That seems to indicate the crypt and compress operations are single threaded, and when you hit fast enough speeds, that becomes the bottle-neck vs your internet connection.

[Divine Mercy]

I am facing the same slow upload speeds, even after changing the Upload Preferences. I tried on my Mac & PC on Chrome & Safari browser. Same results. My desktop sync client no problem. I have more than one DB account. How can i install another account without interfering with the other?

[Claire G.10]

Hi everyone!

As you may know, all of the Dropbox servers are located in the US (and you might live far from those servers).
Moreover, your connection speed to Dropbox depends on the routing you get between your ISP and our servers, and may be slower than your ISP's rated speeds.

Could you try resetting your connection? It might get you a different route and better speeds 🙂 but that is outside of our control :(.
Some ISPs also throttle sustained connections so if you see an initial high connection speed followed by lower speeds, that could be the reason.

You can also configure Dropbox to use all of your network bandwidth, as the default setting includes some throttling in order to keep Dropbox from impeding other network traffic while syncing.

You can read about how to adjust the Dropbox network bandwidth here:

https://help.dropbox.com/syncing-uploads/faster-sync

I hope this helps!

[Jocelyn R.1]

Well sorry Andrea but Dropbox speed sucks... I already said it I know.

Again, I live in Canada, I am tech savvy and work in the telecom industry. I have 175Mbps upload speed and THIS is what I really have and test my speed regularly.

Dropbox speed is NOWHERE near close to half of 0.5% of that, it is brutally slow. So slow I subscribed to Picturelife for my pictures storage and will not be renewing Dropbox when my subscription is over.

Good luck

[Jeff N.3]

Andrea--

I wouldn't have posted on this forum if I hadn't already isolated those variables. I don't have time to give you a complete breakdown of my methodology, but one of the many testing methods I utilized was leveraging an EC2 box in the same datacenter as dropbox and it is capable of completing saturating my home connection, even at peak usage hours, and using SSL. In fact, I was able to get better transfer speeds than dropbox by tunneling my connection through amsterdam, and back to the same datacenter as dropbox in the US.

In addition, I experience slow speeds from dropbox with AND without the app, and have verified the app bandwidth settings.

The more likely scenario: In an effort to reduce costs, dropbox is over scheduling and undersizing their EC2 boxes which act as the gateway to the amazon S3 stores where the files are stored. Therefore, any bottleneck that occurs on the EC2 boxes will give rise to a bottleneck on the overall transfer speed. This bottleneck could be in any number of places: CPU on enc-dec operations (undersizing the EC2 box), CPU on misc serving operations (undersizing the EC2 box), individual EC2 instance bandwidth (over scheduling the EC2 box), too many simultaneous connections to an individual S3 store (Over scheduling an S3 store)

While I completely understand WHY dropbox would do this (gotta make money right?), I am disappointed they are doing this. I would gladly pay $5 more a month to get a speed which I would describe as "price of entry" for a cloud storage service.

Just imagine how upset the people with gigabit internet are? You have gigabit internet and you can only access your dropbox files at 60-100 mbps. I would be irate. Thankfully I only have 150 mbps connection, so the insult doesn't sting as much.

You have to realize that when you offer people 1 TB of cloud storage, the speed at which you can access your files becomes paramount.

[Cicero F.]

Hi, people. We were having the same issue on different browsers (Firefox, IE and Chrome). Even with great internet speed, Dropbox would be very slow to upload files. We realized that this was happening to all web browsers on a specific machine, it was not related to hardware, web browser, Dropbox account or internet connection, just the machine itself.

I am talking about a Windows 7 machine here.

A friend of mine sought out over the web solutions and we found out an interesting command that worked out for us, it is:
netsh winsock reset catalog

Open your CMD and type this in. This should reset all of the settings cached in your web browsing, for us this did resolve the issue and the speed with uploads is better now. I hope the same happens for you.

For Mac platform, I am not sure which command should be the one valid.

[Jeff N.3]

I have this problem on windows, mac, and Linux. I also have the problem in both the web browser (multiple browsers) and the standalone app. I also have the problem with wget.

[robert k.47]

I get 7 megs upload speed here, but am uploading to dropbox at 240 kbps. You guys kind of need to sort out this issue before your business falls apart. You can't blame the ISPs or server hops for this because other services like google drive are much much faster. If other companies can figure it out, I'm sure your geniuses are up to task. 😉

Jeff N. pointed out some good issues. Have your guys take a look at your AWS account and see if you can restructure a few things. I can't believe it actually that dropbox is still using Amazon servers. Certainly you'd find that its way better and cheaper in the long run to manage your own servers.

[Bill A.1]

I have a similar problem, but for me it's the desktop app that is extremely slow to upload whereas through the web browser my uploads are quite fast.