Your workflow is unique 👨💻 - tell us how you use Dropbox here.
Forum Discussion
Rate Limit
I'm considering writing an alternative Dropbox client for Windows, because the official client seems to have a couple of major (for me) issues that don't seem to be going away any time soon:
- Indexing on startup is very slow (~4 hours for 85K files), during which time the machine is almost unusable due to both the CPU and disk being thrashed (on an i5-3570k)
- Functionality is basic; everything must be stored in a single folder, and you can't exclude files using patterns (e.g. *.bak, *.lrprev etc)
But I just read that API calls are rate limited, which may well mean that it's just not practical to have an alternative client, because performance would be so poor.
I realise you don't publish figures for the rate limiting, but before I spend any time on this it would be good to know whether the rate limit is likely to be an issue or not?
2 Replies
Replies have been turned off for this discussion
- Greg-DB
Dropbox Community Moderator
The rate limiting is mostly just designed to prevent abuse, so I doubt this would be an issue.
Be sure to make use of /delta and /longpoll_delta though, for the sake of efficiency:
https://blogs.dropbox.com/developers/2013/12/efficiently-enumerating-dropbox-with-delta/
https://blogs.dropbox.com/developers/2013/11/low-latency-notification-of-dropbox-file-changes/
Good to know, but the lack of a diff-enabled upload method (as you mentioned in my other thread) make an alternative client impossible to implement efficiently :(
Guess I'm stuck with the official client, it the support guys ever get it working again...
About Dropbox API Support & Feedback
Find help with the Dropbox API from other developers.
