Website Photos view is slow

[Thijxx]

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]

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]

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]

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? 

[Thijxx]

Other folders load fine except the photo preview at the top of the page called 'Suggested from your activity'

[Walter]

I see, thanks for clarifying that for me @Thijxx 

May I ask approximately how many photos you've stored in your Dropbox account? 

[Thijxx]

Oof, that is a hard question! I suppose somewhere around 50K

[Nancy]

Hey @Thijxx, hope it’s OK to jump in. Since the number of photos is quite large, this may be the issue here. 

However, when did this start? Is this something that started only recently or has the issue been going on for a while now?

[Thijxx]

It has been this way since I can remember. If you want I can take a look at how many photo's are cached but I guess not many because when I scroll down a bit, it needs to load for about 10 seconds 😂 and this makes it impossible to casually browse my photo's.

If I have 2 million photo's or 2000, loading the first 50 should always perform more or less the same, right?

[Megan]

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?