Extremely slow downloads and views

[anuragrb]

I have an extremely fast gigabit connection, and can download from most websites at near about 100MB/s. However, when I try to download folders from Dropbox, it barely downloads at 1 MB/s if I'm lucky. This seems to be something new since I was able to download some content a couple of weeks ago at the speed I'd expect to be able to. Is my account being throttled or something? Even views of the content in these folders are slow, with each image taking minutes to load at a time.

[Danny13]

I do not know if this is your problem, but I suffered the same for weeks and what I found was that I’d switched on smart sync or something like that, and given authority to sync thousands of files to my laptop in the background. It did what you described and I couldn’t then immediately sync files I had just added, as it was busy syncing thousands of others and took ages to sync just a couple of files very slow. 

[anuragrb]

Unfortunately not. To make things weirder, sometimes the speed will burst up to the max bandwidth of my connection and then go back down to below 1 MB/s. It really feels like some weird form of throttling.

[Megan]

Hi @anuragrb, let's jump right into this! 

If I understand this correctly, you're using the website in order to download your content, and preview some of your files when you notice the slow downloads, am I right? 

Your account shouldn't be throttled, as this isn't something that happens with specific Dropbox accounts, unless the site is down for everyone. Do you use a specific browser when this happens? 

If I were you, I'd try to use a different browser, clear the cache and use an incognito tab on my current one, just to see if the behavior there is the same. Can you give it a go?

Keep me posted!

[Peter M.42]

Yes!!! Extremely slow since a few months and more slow to not usable since the update for Mac-Ventura (moving DropBox to a secure place ... BS!!). No network activity by DropBox FileProvider for 20-30 minutes, than 1-3 minutes activity and no activity for again 20-30 minutes.

I need my files offline, the online is the default what makes me angry.

Waiting for 10GB since 4 hours now. Not usable.

[Gene Wayne]

Hello! I faced this problem, Dropbox does not upload one video file (10-30 GB) faster than 15-25 megabits per second, although my upload speed is 100 megabits per second. If I upload a file to Dropbox Replay, the speed there is about 80-100 megabits per second.

[Hannah]

Hey @Peter M.42, I understand you're referring to the desktop app and not the website.

Can you check the Dropbox application preferences, to make sure the bandwidth used is not limited?

[Hannah]

Hey @Gene Wayne, thanks for letting us know about this.

If you quit the Dropbox app and then relaunch it, do you see any difference in behavior?

[Gene Wayne]

Hi @Hannah !
Restarted, nothing has changed. This has been for a long time, It didn't bother me before, but now I work with large video files and it is very unpleasant. Dropbox Transfer and Dropbox Web also upload 20-25 megabits per second, but Dropbox Replay, Frame.IO,  MEGA upload almost 100 megabits.

Recently, I had to use another service (MASV) to transfer the file faster, screenshot below.

[Megan]

Hi @Gene Wayne, it's interesting that you notice this behavior on both the app, and the website. 

Do you have any proxy, VPN, firewall, security software, or even ISP/router settings that could be restricting traffic to the following Dropbox domains?

If so, could you temporarily disable any antivirus or firewalls you may have running on your computer and try again?