Hi everyone,
We are really sorry to hear about your issues and that we didn’t catch this thread earlier.
Diagnosing CPU usage is tricky because even if all your issues seem similar they’re actually different and probably linked to your particular set up.
There are a few known cases where Dropbox was responsible for high CPU or memory usage:
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When we rolled out a new feature, called File Identifiers, back in the end of 2014. @Dave, this could be what you were hitting at that time.
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Edge cases with our features like Badge
Apart from that the Dropbox client shouldn’t use a high percentage of your computer’s performance, especially when not syncing files.
We monitor CPU and memory usage really closely and each time there’s a spike (a lot of people suddenly consuming more CPU than usual) we investigate thoroughly to see what the root cause could be and fix this. We take this very seriously.
This is why, unless you fall into the above-mentioned explanations, your problem is very likely to be linked to external factors conflicting with Dropbox.
Here a non-exhaustive list of factors that could explain your issues:
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Symlinks pointing outside of the Dropbox folder
- Files in your Dropbox folder with permission incorrectly set (the app will endlessly try to sync them)
- Dropbox folder installed on NAS
- Dropbox folders installed on drive with a file system that doesn’t support extended attributes
- A lot of files (performance starts to decrease after 300k files)
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Conflicting third party app (an app accesses your files and modifies them, then Dropbox syncs the change, then the app accesses the files again, etc… this is usually syncing apps, backing up apps, anti-viruses and/or security softwares)
- A huge sync e.g. if you suddenly upload 100k files, Dropbox will use more CPU than usual to perform this action
If your set up falls into one of these situations, here are the respective solutions:
- Remove the symlinks
- Move Dropbox to another drive if possible or stop using Dropbox on the NAS, we do not support Network Share file system
- Move Dropbox to another drive or format your drive with a file system supporting extended attributes
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- Try disabling any potential conflicting app one by one until you identified the one causing the issue
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Upload files in smaller batches, or temporarily reduce the priority of the dropbox process to limit resource usage of Dropbox like this:
If none of your set up falls into those categories or if even after trying the above, Dropbox is still using too much CPU, I’d recommend writing into support here
Our support engineers will look at your computer logs precisely and should be able to help (I can’t do that on this Forum thread as this is personal information we cannot share publicly)
I hope this helps!
Dropbox Staff
