Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by lazerwalker 4072 days ago
I've moved away from Dropbox purely because the desktop (OS X) app has gotten so terrible. Besides the lack of responsiveness mentioned in the article, Dropbox routinely takes up > 90% of my CPU resources while running. If I'm working at a coffee shop without power, having Dropbox running literally halves my battery life. This is new as of the last six months, and happens consistently across multiple Macs. I've asked Dropbox employees about this, and they've just shrugged.

I don't care if they innovate or not. I care that the experience of using Dropbox is measurably worse than it was a year ago.
4 comments
ejdyksen 4072 days ago
In my experience, Dropbox responds to all file system I/O, even those outside of the Dropbox folders, strangely.

If I'm running, say, npm install or bundle install or installing Xcode (or doing anything else I/O heavy), Dropbox starts using a bunch of CPU, proportional to the amount of I/O going on at the time. Note that none of these operations are inside my Dropbox folder.

I do believe the FSEvents infrastructure allows you to just watch an individual folder [1], so it shouldn't have to be this way...

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin...

link
hashmymustache 4072 days ago
Same. I'll run npm install on my desktop and suddenly dropbox is at 110% CPU doing nothing. I end up having to force quit it and forget to restart it. It's VERY frustrating.
link
0898 4072 days ago
On my MacBook, the OS X client has said "Syncing (29 files remaining)" for as long as I can remember.

As far as I can tell, there's no way to tell which of my 18,394 files are stuck.

link
wordbank 4072 days ago
Oh yes, I wrote to their support and forums many times but it was futile.

I'm using Mac Mini with HDD and Dropbox takes 90% of disk I/O when there are more than 20-30 files updating.

I used to keep my projects in Dropbox folder before but now it literally slows my work.

link
seanp2k2 4072 days ago
Exactly the same situation; projects folder in Dropbox, had to move it out because it would use 100% of one core very frequently.
link
benologist 4072 days ago
That happens to me too, it's also getting a bit silly that you still can't exclude directories easily, and the "share" menu only seems to work in the root dropbox folder these days.
link