Syncing takes more time than normal lately and it's taking some time to start it up upon rebooting

[rf44]

NOTE: I posted this yeserday but it was marked as spam for some reason.

To clean up and speed things up, I recently reformatted the hard drive on my Mac and did a complete reinstall of everything including Dropbox. To save time (I thought), I kept almost all the files on Dropbox rather than backups. I am now having extreme issues getting everything synched back up and it's been over a week! I've reviewed many articles but can't get to the answer. Here is a summary:

- Running Mac Catlina 10.15.4 and Dropbox v19.4.172 (latest for Mac). I use Kaspersky Internet Security but disabled it (which I'm not happy about).
- Dropbox takes at least half an hour before it starts synching (it just says "Starting").
- Dropbox says I have 2.4 million files (which is hard to believe but I can't verify it since neither the desktop app nor the Web show how many there are--would be a nice feature). Per my calculations, average file size is 500 KB, though a majority are probably much bigger
- I've reset permissions and links, checked "no limit" for upload/download, and rebooted the computer and router many times. Speedtest shows about 75mbps download, , and everything else is moving fine.
- In selective Synch I selected about 14,000 total files for about 29GB. Even though I just selected that many, the synch started at 2.5M files. If I'm not downloading all of them why does it show that? I did copy these files from an older backup, thinking that would help.
- It was going at about 10k files per hour (which means like a week) though I don't know how to calculate the speed.
- It got "down" to 650k files then for no apparent reason seemed to restart at the 2.4M.
- My laptop is having similar issues.

Until I can figure this out, it's having an extreme impact on my productivity. Luckily I had the files I need to work on but there is no way this should take this long and keep resetting the numbers.

Thank you,

RF

[Lusil]

Hi there @rf44, thanks for reaching out to us. 

As a first step, just to make sure we cover as much initial troubleshooting as possible, could you try the following steps in the exact order listed?

• Click on the Dropbox icon in your menu bar.
• Go to the gear in the Notifications panel.
• Select Preferences...
• Navigate to the Account tab.
• Click anywhere in the window under the tab.
• Hold down the Option/Alt key.
• Click on Fix Hardlinks (make sure you're still holding down Option/Alt). You may be asked for your computer's login credentials, in which case, please enter them.

At this point, wait a bit to see if Dropbox resumes syncing and, if you're still having trouble, repeat the first six steps, but at the sevent step, select Fix Permissions, instead. 

Let me know how it goes, cheers!

[rf44]

Lusil, 

Thank you for the quick response and suggestions.   I had alrady fixed HardLinks (which seems to take about a second--is that right?) and permissions (takes a few minutes) but just did all of that again.  I don't believe that hlped last time so we'll see.  

I put together a spreadsheet and pasted part of it below (ignore first row).  As you can see, the "avg files/hr" picked up significantly between 8pm-8am this morning, but then once I started doing things it grinded back down.    My Speedtest still shows 70mbps download, 7mbps upload.   But as mentioned in my original post, "In selective Synch I selected about 14,000 total files for about 29GB" so I have no idea what is going on here.  Please let me know thoughts. 

This has tied up my computer for days, with the CPU constantly maxed out, and it's hard to get anything done.     I don't recall ever having anything like this in the past, other than Dropbox occasionally synching 100s of thousands of files for no apparent reason but that didn't take anywhere near this long.

Please help.  I'm afraid to quit DB now and restart since it. might start all over agin.

Thank you,

Ron

Time	Files Left	Elapsed Hr	# Files since last	Avg files/hr		Est Hrs	Est Days
5/12/2020 1:30 PM	1,894,132	99.50	-954,132	-9,589		-197.53	-8.23
5/12/2020 2:00 PM	1,879,511	0.50	14,621	29,242		64.27	2.68
5/12/2020 2:30 PM	1,865,931	0.50	13,580	27,160		68.70	2.86
5/12/2020 3:00 PM	1,856,755	0.50	9,176	18,352		101.17	4.22
5/12/2020 5:06 PM	1,819,000	2.10	37,755	17,979		101.18	4.22
5/12/2020 6:20 PM	1,799,372	1.23	19,628	15,915		113.06	4.71
5/12/2020 8:12 PM	1,745,811	1.87	53,561	28,693		60.84	2.54
5/13/2020 8:15 AM	1,006,778	12.05	739,033	61,331		16.42	0.68
5/13/2020 9:00 AM	998,000	0.75	8,778	11,704		85.27	3.55
5/13/2020 10:00 AM	988,854	1.00	9,146	9,146		108.12	4.50
5/13/2020 10:30 AM	982,345	0.50	6,509	13,018		75.46	3.14

[rf44]

Lusil,  I completed the steps you suggested about resetting hardlinks and permissions.   The permissions ended up taking about 30 minutes to complete, at which point the average files per hour shot up to between 60k-154k for a couple of hours but now it's once again slowed to a crawl of around 7k files per hour.    I am working on the computer as I do this but nothing too intensive.

This is a critical problem now.  Please advise on any steps I can take to fix it.

Thank you, Ron

[rf44]

UPDATE: It appears that my ISP has throttled my speed, probably due to this running for days and also it's prime time.   Speedtest shows download of 6.79mbps (was 70-ish) and upload of 1.5mbps!    So perhaps this will go back up overnight.

[Lusil · Accepted solution]

Thanks for keeping me in the loop throughout this, @rf44!

Since you mention that you experienced high CPU usage, could you also have a look at this article, in case any of the listed suggestions help? 

In the meantime, could you also have a look at your Support page to see your options to contacting our team?

Let me know what you find, cheers!

[rf44]

Lusil,   Thank you for keeping up on this.  

The article you sent regarding CPU usage was very good.  While most of it didn't apply (overall CPU usage is around 50-70%), the symlinks section led me to discover that I was selectively-synching many more folders than I thought, for a total of at least 1.5M files.  There were about 450 symlinks that were copies of old Apple mail folders.  I just discovered that the reason I missed these things was that the folder info on a Mac shows only files IN THAT FOLDER but does not include files in folders within it.  Thus there were many many more files/folders than I thought.   

Rather than fix this how and then have it restart the whole thing, I guess I'll grind it out and wait.   It seems to be moving along pretty well at the moment--down to 200k files!   In any case, it does seem that taking 3-4 days with decent bandwidth for that many files is a tad long.   If you have any reference articles for next time please let me know.

Thank you again for the help!

Ron

[rf44]

This did finish much faster after I fixed the links (per Lusil's above and the article).   

When it was done, I set up Selective Synch to get some folders off of the computer that I didn't need.  It showed the same number of files (about 1.9M, I believe) but went much faster, still took around 12-15 hours.   

Can someone provide general guidance on this topic?  I want to know if the best approach is for me, if the files are not on the computer  to keep the files in Dropbox then download, or restore from backup to the computer and wait for the upload?  I'd think the latter would be much faster but haven't seen that yet.

Thank you again,

Ron