Out of curiosity, how much does bandwidth usage contribute to your overall operational efficiency (as compared to for example the cost of running the actual servers)? Would totally understand if you can't answer this :)
Alexey from Traffic Team is here. Traffic is definitely a non-negligible part of the budget. We try to reduce it as much as possible for both lower operational expenses and better user experience. Main drivers for that improvement (besides owning our own Edge infrastructure) on the client side are:
1) Brotli (Broccoli) compression.
2) Differential updates through librsync.
3) "LANSync" a P2P sync within a broadcast domain (secured through server issued short lived TLS certs.)
That said, Desktop Client is only 1/3 of the overall Dropbox traffic -- the rest 2/3 are split between Web and API.
Does this ratio include the Dropbox official mobile apps?
Have LANsync peers been considered as a sources of blocks for mobile clients?
Like most, I’m observing (and participating in) multidimensional access to data. For not, accessing files on my local desktop is still much faster than direct downloads from the Dropbox cloud. It’s a bummer to source files that are on my LAN from the cloud. This may become more problematic as bandwidth billing models move toward pay-per-bit.
> Desktop Client is only 1/3 of the overall Dropbox traffic -- the rest 2/3 are split between Web and API
Interesting! I assume the desktop client is still dropbox's main product so that's surprising to hear. Is it because the desktop has everything cached and rarely has to download whereas web and mobile has to download a fresh copy each time they are viewed?
1) Brotli (Broccoli) compression.
2) Differential updates through librsync.
3) "LANSync" a P2P sync within a broadcast domain (secured through server issued short lived TLS certs.)
That said, Desktop Client is only 1/3 of the overall Dropbox traffic -- the rest 2/3 are split between Web and API.