(OS X) Dropbox consuming a lot of CPU whenever any file or folder is changed anywhere

Ed, can you please briefly explain what is meant by "Symlinks pointing outside of the Dropbox folder" and perhaps less briefly explain how you would go about fixing this condition and stopping it from re-occurring?

Means paths that are pointing to folders living outside your Dropbox folder.

For more details: https://www.dropbox.com/help/9199

Symlinks

Because symlinks refer to locations outside of the Dropbox folder, the Dropbox desktop app could get stuck attempting to access them.

Determine if symlinks are the cause with these steps:

For OS X computers

1. Open your Terminal app located at /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.
2. Copy and paste the command line below and press Enter on your keyboard.

find ~/Dropbox -type l -exec ls -lah {} \;

For Windows computers

1. Press the Windows + R keys (at the same time) on your keyboard.
2. Type "cmd" and press Enter on your keyboard to open the command prompt.
3. Copy and paste the command line below and press Enter on your keyboard.

dir "%HOMEPATH%\Dropbox" /a:l /s

By default, the Dropbox folder is located in ~/Dropbox. If you have a Dropbox Business account, the default location for the business Dropbox folder is~/Dropbox (Your team name). To search the business Dropbox folder you should replace ~/Dropbox with the full pathway to the Dropbox folder within quotation marks. You should do the same if you moved the Dropbox folder to a location other than the default location. See the follwing example pathway:

 find "users/Michel/Documents/Dropbox (Enterprise)" -type l -exec ls

Ed,

Your last command needs this on the end:

-lah {} \;

But anyway finds nothing even if I make shortcuts/aliases to files/folders lying outside the Dropbox folder.

Please advise.

Have you guys figured this out yet? I can't afford to have my CPU over 100% as it makes my computer slow. Can't you guys cap your Dropbox app to use only maybe 20% of CPU time? If you think this is not enough then you guys just have a bad design or poor developers. Figure it out or I am looking for another solution.

Yes, I did, Google Drive is the way to go. 

It's sad, because I like Dropbox, but I can't afford having this 100% CPU problem, my computer heats like hell, and this reduces the lifetime of my processors, so I'm not going to pay for a service that does that, it's like paying it twice.

Sad but true.

I found this thread a few minutes ago because I haven't had this issue until today. For the past two years Dropbox has worked silently in the background but today it decided to be running at 50% CPU all the time. I haven't changed anything recently.

I'm trying their suggestions like removing directories with symlinks, but my Dev folder where I keep many python projects seems to be the one with all the sym links. I'm moving that to Google Drive I guess since Dropbox can't handle symlinks? Seems extremely lame. 

Steven G., Sebastian K., Kevin B., 

As I could note, you are programmers.

Did you notice that Dropbox now has only one plan 1TB $9.99 monthly? 

They don't care about programmers, they wanna build an average service for an average person that will use 10, 20GB only and will not complain because they will never need to store the same amount of files programmers need. They will never open a terminal, use brew or npm, use symlinks, etc. They don't care about fixing this, they prefer us to leave and charge average people for an average service that will make these casual users very happy.

Shame on you Dropbox.

I switched to self hosted seafile and won't look back. Dropbox does not care about user experience at all.

It's a SHAME that their client on macOS is such CRAP, and at the same time there is so much GREAT code from dropbox on github with all sorts of experiments in different languages, more optimized that python for file hashing - https://github.com/dropbox/