Why is it so slow uploadfile

It is all based upon your internet connection - remember uploads are usually much slower than downloads.

http://www.howtogeek.com/200728/why-does-it-take-so-long-to-upload-data-to-the-cloud/

Robert's right, there are various factors involved here, but generally the main contributor to how fast files can be sent back or forth is your Internet connection.

All of the Dropbox servers are located in the US. Your connection speed to Dropbox depends on the routing you get between your ISP and our servers, and may be slower than your ISP's rated speeds.

Sometimes resetting or retrying your connection gets you a different route and better speeds, but that is outside of our control. Some ISPs also throttle sustained connections so if you see an initial high connection speed followed by lower speeds, that could be the reason.

I believe that they use different algorithm in their client and in their API.

I still think their client is faster than their API.

Hello,

Same impression here. I tried to upload a 20mo file. On the client it took about 10s but on the API it was about 2:30 minutes.

Why ? And how I can optimise that ?

Thank you!

Hello,

I use a normal account. Does the business account will fix the upload time on the API ?

thank you for your reply

Hi Nicolas, the client isn't a good comparison as it doesn't use the Dropbox API and it performs many different optimizations. (For example, it doesn't have to upload a file again if the user already uploaded the same data.)

Anyway, the speed you see on the API will be very dependent on your network connection, but doesn't vary based on the kind of account you have.

Hi Gregory,

Thank you for your reply. I tried again to send two different files of the same size, that wasn't on my dropbox before. It is still much more longer on the API.

I use the PHP API, I have the impression that the function $dbxClient->chunkedUploadContinue() take more time than just the upload to finish. Because there is large break between each chunk.

Do you know if I can do optimisation in some way ?

Best,

To be clear, the deduplication isn't the only optimization the desktop client makes, so it still isn't a perfect comparison.

There is some overhead when using chunked uploading, as you have to make a new HTTP request for each chunk. You can increase the chunk size you're using to reduce that impact, albeit at the cost of being more prone to errors, such as timeouts.

It would be nice if I could change the chunk size in the iOS SDK (v1) but it seems it's hardcoded to 2048.

That's correct Gerardo. We'll consider this a feature request. (Note that the SDK is open source though, so you could add the source directly and modify it as desired.)