[jwr]

Dropbox is in my opinion synonymous with poor performance. The client always consumed way too much CPU. On a Mac, Dropbox will react to changes anywhere in the filesystem, and consume excessive amounts of CPU even if the files you work on have nothing to do with Dropbox. If you use selective sync, stuff that lands in folders not synced to your computer will still cause Dropbox to consume CPU.

Storing a lot of files inside your Dropbox will also cause performance problems. Which means that paying for extra space (I do) isn't that useful if you intend to keep your git repos with source code there.

It has been like that for years, the company has made little progress performance-wise (instead we got useless things like photo-something-or-other-that-tries-to-access-my-photos).

I learned to live with it, because the advantages of Dropbox outweigh the disadvantages of a poor implementation. Dropbox is still a very good product, even if you have to pay a hefty price in CPU and battery life for it. I dream that one day someone will decide that performance is a goal worth pursuing and finally optimize the thing.

[modoc]

Why would you put your git repo in DropBox? That seems counter-intuitive to me. I specifically keep anything in a VCS out of DropBox since then you're versioning stuff twice....

I have just under 150,000 files in DropBox and haven't noticed any performance issues. DropBox rarely shows up in Activity Monitor's first 20 CPU users (unlike MediaFire which is usually burning CPU for no reason and only managing 200 files).

Perhaps it's an OS difference? I am on OS X 10.11.1.

[benologist]

Dropbox = real time, automatic, versioned backup of all files in your entire project, making you and your work safe from deleting files, accidentally overwriting files etc, all the time.

Git = not that.

[RightWingRabble]

Have you ever tried AeroFS?

[pdeuchler]

I store my whole workspace on Dropbox (minus some sensitive projects which are in my tarsnap-workspace). Every single one of my projects starts out with

>> mkdir projectname && cd projectname && git init

but not all of those projects end up on github/online repos.

Regardless, git is not backup, and dropbox isn't (real) versioning.

[dubya]

Regarding Dropbox reacting to changes anywhere in the filesystem: I found that turning off everything under "Import" in preferences seemed to stop it. After that it was perfectly fine on an old 2008 Macbook with spinning disk hard drive. Anecdata, but worth checking.

[wodenokoto]

I haven't used dropbox for a year but it told be specifically not to try and sync git-repos via dropbox when I tried, because it would have performance impact and could result in unexpected behaviour.