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Thijxx's avatar
Thijxx
Helpful | Level 6
4 months ago

Website Photos view is slow

Howdy, viewing photo's on the Dropbox website is painfully slow. Is there a way to get better performance from the Dropbox website when viewing photos? When I use the profiler in Firefox I can see that the previews.dropbox.com takes 3.3 seconds to reply, is this normal?

 

  • 1Gbit fiber connection, tested with Google Fiber speed Test
  • 64GB RAM
  • 16 Cores
  • Tested with Chrome, Safari, Firefox on Windows, MacOS and Linux (Ubuntu, Arch, Manjaro and Debian)
  • Rebooted every machine 7 times, just so I can write this

*Not many useful labels in the "choose a label" list

  • Walter's avatar
    Walter
    Icon for Dropbox Staff rankDropbox Staff

    Hey Thijxx - thanks for bringing this to our attention.

     

    Can you just clarify if you're noticing this on an incognito or private browsing window with no plugins or extensions running as well?

     

    Also, have you tried another network since you first noticed this?

     

    Let me know more and we'll take it from there.

    • Thijxx's avatar
      Thijxx
      Helpful | Level 6

      Yes I run extensions, I block your Adobe trackers and your Qualtrics "Experience Manager" but when I use private browsing, without the blocker, it is just as slow. First page of photo's takes 7 seconds.

      When switching to a 5G dongle the performance is the same.

       

      Could you tell me what I should expect in terms of performance? Should the photos page load sub-second or is that not fair?

      • Walter's avatar
        Walter
        Icon for Dropbox Staff rankDropbox Staff

        Thanks for the additional information Thijxx 

         

        Could you also clarify if this happens only when browsing the Photos page or if it's affecting other folders of yours as well? 

  • Megan's avatar
    Megan
    Icon for Dropbox Staff rankDropbox Staff

    Hey @Thijxx, let me also jump in here! 

     

    Yeah pretty much. I'd also like to ask you to clear your browser's cache if that's not too much of a trouble. 

     

    You also mentioned this happens only with the "Suggested" pictures, right? Meaning if you try to locate a picture in your account and then preview it, do you notice the same behavior? 

    • Charlie Windsor's avatar
      Charlie Windsor
      Helpful | Level 7

      Hi @Megan,  @Thijxx 

      Same issue here ... 13k of Photos which are unviewable using the Dropbox website. As already mentioned the Dropbox Website loads the first 50 or so then needs to re-cache or re-index the whole collection again when viewing/scrolling .... Clearing the browser cache makes no difference, the only thing that helps is significantly reducing the number of images stored .... For reference OneDrive and Google Photos Websites work fine with >20k of images, give it a test with some images - its a Dropbox  issue.

       

      • Megan's avatar
        Megan
        Icon for Dropbox Staff rankDropbox Staff

        Hey @Charlie Windsor, thanks for reporting! 

         

        Do you think you could send me a couple of screenshots of a step-by-step that you follow on your end? 

         

        I'd love to have a visual of this.

         

        Thanks a bunch!