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Forum Discussion
Upload app sync speed is insanely slow compared to web speed
Located in South Africa.
I have 500 mbps down/100-200 mbps upload.
When I use the browser to upload 1 gb, it uploads in a minute or so.
When I upload the same 1gb via the dropbox app, it crawls at ~200-400 kb/s, taking over an hour to upload!
I went into my preferences>bandwidth>don't limit upload and download speed through the app preferences.
Still, I get this throttle. I really need to fix this due to work. Please help!
Update:
I uninstalled NordVPN app and suddenly dropbox upload speeds are back up to 14,000 kb/s.Which means that even though NordVPN was OFF, and not active, it still had some bizarre impact on UPLOAD speed. No effect on download...
The confusing part is that my laptop also has the NordVPN software installed. However, it has no issue on that computer.
Laptop is running windows 11, while main machine is running windows 10 pro.
Would really love to find a solution if anyone has one.
- Rich
Super User II
andy03 wrote:
When I upload the same 1gb via the dropbox app, it crawls at ~200-400 kb/s, taking over an hour to upload!
You can't really compare the upload speed on the website to the speed of the Dropbox app. There's a lot more going on during a sync than a simple upload. Each file you sync is hashed, compressed, then transferred, encrypted, and stored on the Dropbox servers. That entire process is included in the aggregate KB/s speed that's displayed in the Dropbox sync status. In other words, the speed reported by Dropbox is not just a transfer speed, but the speed at which the entire process is being completed. With the website, it's just a simple upload and everything else is done behind the scenes after the upload is completed.
Also, while most ISPs and speed test sites display their results in bits (kilo or mega), the speeds reported by Dropbox are in Bytes. Be sure to do the conversion before comparing. Your 400KB/s transfer speed as reported by Dropbox is approximately 3.2Mb/s.
Thank you for the answer, Rich. I'm aware of the conversion of kbs>mbps. Its why I felt I needed to write here.
My other PC in a different location with the same internet speeds has the dropbox app at that point is uploading 1gb within a minute or two as well. But this PC and app, the internet speed is the same but the upload speed is throttled big time. I'm not sure what to point at because again, the disparity is huge. I work in VFX and I need to upload 10-100 gb/day. 1 gb taking 1 hour to upload is just not feasible.
Especially when I upload it to the website in 1 minute and it is immediately available for syncing on my desktop app and is able to sync/download at 26,000 kb/s.
So why is my downloads speed 26,000 kb/s and upload speed crawling at 160 kb/s in the app? That's my big question. I can see what you wrote making sense, but it doesn't account for the same file tested at a different location/PC with the exact same speeds on internet speed tests, but uploading much faster?
- Jay
Dropbox Staff
Hi andy03, thanks for bringing this to our attention.
Do you have any proxy, VPN, firewall, security software, or even ISP/router settings that could be restricting traffic to the following Dropbox domains?
This will help me to assist further!
Uninstall any kind of VPNs, also stuff like ZeroTier.
Then reset Windows firewall to default.
Then go to Settings / Network & Internet / Advanced network settings / Network reset and reset all network stuff from there.
Worked on my device.
