High CPU usage even when not syncing or indexing

[fort]

For the past couple of days, Dropbox has been consistently using around 30% of my CPU, when not syncing or indexing anything (i.e., the menu bar drop down says `Up to date`). Any idea why this might be happening, and what I can do to get Dropbox to idle properly?

I'm on a MacBook Air, running macOS 10.13.6 and Dropbox 58.4.92.

Thanks.

[Fiona]

I have emailed you to look into this. If you wish to continue troubleshooting please follow up with me there. Thank you! 

[Michael M.224]

I found that exiting dropbox and ending the dropbox processes solved my problem.

It appears that all the addons and unwanted upgrades have ended the functionallity of my simple needs, like I really needed the 3TB of online storage for my paid subscription.

Luckly there are alternatives.

[gyltefors]

The worst support I have ever seen! I'll just follow the same advice to turn off Dropbox.

[Fiona]

Thanks for joining Community to share your feedback @gyltefors. 

Sorry to hear that you are dissatisfied. Do you need me to help you with anything? I am not sure what your problem is, but if I get a brief description I will do my best. 

Even if you have decided to leave us and you don't need a fix for the issues you are facing, I would be glad to look into any support Communication you have with us. Please provide me with your ticket numbers. 

Reviewing the cases you give us feedback for, helps us get better. Thank you. 

Thank you! 

[rgrinberg]

Dropbox also seems to be consistently hovering at around 10% cpu usage for me when doing nothing. I've even ppaused syncing and there's no difference.

In case you ask, no I don't have any symlinks 🙂

[Fiona]

Thank you for checking for symlinks and for letting me know what you've tried already. 

I would be glad to look into this further for you @rgrinberg. I see you are new in Community, so I want to explain that for us to further investigate, we email the addresses users have associated with their Community profiles and then we verify their account, to get access to some tools and information and help more effectively. 

We cannot see much via the Community for security and privacy reasons.  

Let me know if I can open a ticket for you. Thanks! 

[Michael M.224]

I will admit the problem appears to have abated.  After shutting down dropbox for a few days and cancelling my subscription, dropbox appears to be behaving itself lately as far as unusual disk activity.

It is still unknown what it was doing and Fiona does not appear to know (or be able to find out) but it appears to have completed.  Perhaps it was adopting a new indexing routine as some dropbox functions appear to be more responsive.  Opening my dropbox folder from IE, which was annoyingly slow is now much more sponsive.  I course I have no real idea if that is related to the disk activity which went on for days.

It is interesting that I can now create documents from dropbox using more button clicks than I typically use.  Yet another example of unwanted features.  Only 7 more months before I need my alternatives in place.

[gdewey]

y my macbook crashed 2 days ago and got a new one with a totally new clean MacOS catanlina with no apps. My first app to install was dropbox as all my data is store in Dropbox business. 

ever since my cpu has being consuming all resources cpu making the fan not to rest at any time. 

I am sure the os creates symlinks by default to get shared folders within the OS it self in some apps. But I wont mess with this as they where created by default to resolve a problem Dropbox has. 

To bad the product quality droped down. 

Hope you can post here a real solution to the problem. 

[Fiona]

We appreciate both positive and negative feedback @Michael M.224. Sorry to hear the new options are not something you needed. 

Am glad to hear the CPU issue is now resolved.

Allow me to add that we do know all the factors that can play a part in having high CPU issues and have them listed here. Since we cannot see details via Community, we take it a step further and further and investigate the reports further, to give more specific answers to your specific situations/issues. 

I'd be happy to look into device details and assist you personally with any further issues you might face in the future. Just let me know. 

@gdewey I am afraid symlinks are the issue in you case. Please checked the Help Center article I offered above and this Community discussion. 

Thank you!

[simpleben]

I also have issues with DropBox using CPU for no apparent reason. I first noticed it today. It seems like with each update things just get more bloated and slower. +1 @Michael M.224, I agree these features only make the product harder to use and less useful altogether. It would be great if there was an "advanced" version of DropBox that you could use strictly for (wait for it) online file storage. Just link a folder to an account and build a simple (not bloated) UI that is responsive and does not constantly get confused about the status of my DropBox. The icon takes several minutes to figure out what happened when I add a file to DropBox. I'd happily pay a subscription for a non-bloated version of DropBox. I thought I was willing to pay having more storage in DropBox, but frankly I'm not sure it's worth it if the interface is so slow to update.