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by rconti 3850 days ago
Wow, guess I'm the only one who never noticed performance issues on my Macs. I remember when Google Drive first came out years ago, the client caused the system to slow to a halt, so I stopped using it. I'm sure it got fixed, but it only takes one bad experience to kill it for a user.

Interesting thread.
3 comments
christoph 3850 days ago
I have had problems on the Mac and to some extent Windows as well. Generally the fix has been to totally close Dropbox, clear out the Dropbox cache, which is a set of hidden files somewhere (look in their support pages or Google for it) and then re-install the Dropbox application. It more than likely will do a full re-index and this is an absolute pain and CPU hog when it happens. If you have a lot of files, it can day half a day to a full day.

I'm not sure exactly what happens, but my guess is that somehow an index in it's internal database gets corrupted and then it sits in a loop there for some reason whenever it hits that file/folder.

We have used Dropbox extensively in our office across Windows & OSX for at least 2 years and have had this periodically (and randomly) happen on some machines. Although I can't recall it happening in the last 6 months or so.

There was a period where it happened almost fortnightly to someone in the office and we almost swore off Dropbox to something else.

The above has always fixed the issue for us. YMMV.

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codazoda 3850 days ago
I've had a similar experience.

I've never noticed a problem with Dropbox. Of course, I'm not running tools that show me battery consumption of apps and such on my Mac. Battery lasts long enough that it's never been a problem to look into.

I also had trouble with early versions of Google Drive. Maybe it's time to give it a try again. The problem I had was that drive thought all of my files had changed every day and started syncing the entire Google Drive folder again. I removed it and haven't tried it again since.

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ypeterholmes 3850 days ago
On my macbook pro Google Drive has improved but still causes trouble and generally runs much slower than dropbox, which has always run flawlessly.
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x0x0 3850 days ago
Me either, but unless the client self-updates I'm running a 3.5 year old client.
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rconti 3849 days ago
It must. I'm running 3.10.11 which the release notes say is the latest. I remember they changed their UI in the OS X menubar icon to be really crappy a couple years ago which I griped about. That's the only way I knew it was updating itself.
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