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Forum Discussion
chrismo
7 years agoHelpful | Level 6
Maximum download and upload speeds
I'm setting up a new computer and syncing my dropbox business account to it. The internet connection is great on fiber optic cable (1500MB/s) but my download speeds on dropbox are about 24MB/sec Wha...
- 7 years ago
That won't do you any good. There are so many things that affect speed that you could have two people with an identical setup and still have wildly different speeds. Your computer, your local network, your ISP, the route your traffic takes to get to Dropbox, the Dropbox network and servers, congestion along any part of the route to Dropbox, throttling by your ISP (very common), failures along the route that cause your traffic to take another path, etc.
Simply put, there is no expected speed. You get whatever speed you're capable of given all the factors above, and many others.
DimTaniels
6 years agoNew member | Level 2
These responses are good but not the right answer.
It has to do with with the fact that DropBox picks data from your computer in 4MB blocks, then places on their server as it builds your file back up. The speed of this is dertermined by your machine and their machine. We'll go ahead and assume their machines are on the "super computer" level and our machines are not. Even with a Ryzen 3990x 64 core CPU, you'll still cap out. I use an 2009 MacPro Tower with 12cores at 3.4. This tower still revials newer iMac Pros.
So... How do I know this? I spent roughly 6 hours on tech support that ended with a Sr. Tech letting me know this.
I had fiber installed at my house, one of the first houses in the neighborhood to have it so my speeds were right at 960mbps up and down... Drop Box... 13-15MBps... Which meant I could upload 1TB of raw footage in about 18hrs. I am NOT complaining about that as that means in about a day and a half, I can have a 2TB video shoot backed up. (In addition to 3 phyisical hard drives)
BUT, why not 100MBps (800mbps)?? It'd be pretty nice knowing I can get all footage backed up in about 6hrs.
So I called ATT, nope, they have no reason to throttle upload. I checked a few other file transfer softwares and the like and... Google Drive was hitting close to 60MBps on the same machine. Welp... off to DropBox tech support and wahlaa, DropBox is the problem.
Don't waste time calling you ISP or checking your network set up. If you have fiber, even on wifi, you should have plenty of bandwidth to hit 15-30MBps.
Please correct me if I am wrong or was shared incoorect information by this Sr. Tech... but afterwards, in my digging around google on how this conecpt works, it made sense.
Bright
5 years agoExplorer | Level 4
So, this is the reason I should stop with Dropbox. However, their backup/restore functionality is great, so I will have to rethink about this.
Getting a 500Mbps up/down (62MBps) connection soon, so some reconsideration would be good, for I wanted full backups to Dropbox, which seems not doable with this slow speeds.
- Think Jarvis5 years agoExplorer | Level 3
Really interesting thread! I have over half a million files in dropbox and two copies synced. One on a portable and one on a workstation.
You have to remember that Dropbox is a backup and storage service. So it is a passive process and is limited somewhat to account for the number of customers Dropbox has.
The upload process is processor intensive as other users have suggested upload speed is often quicker on faster CPUs with SSDs.
If you need a faster backup, get a NAS drive with RAID and Dropbox capabilities. The dropobx backup can then take place overnight safe in the knowledge that there are at least 2 copies already available locally.
- nj215 years agoExplorer | Level 3
I have this problem. I have fiber internet and my old Acer laptop is maxing out the syncing speed via Wifi. Now, I have an MSI laptop that is newer and has better specs but it syncs really slow. My PC, which is my main workstation, with even better specs and fast storage, connected to the gigabit router directly, also gets capped speeds like my MSI laptop. Currently, I'm forced to use the old laptop for syncing files and it's a bit troublesome to transfer files back and forth. I hope someone might know the fix for this. Thank you.
- Bright5 years agoExplorer | Level 4This is what I do. But the 'overnight sync' took a few days (almost a week). Fortunately the incremental backups for next days were very small so after a few days extra the Dropbox was on par with the backups. However, this really is a not working way and indeed Dropbox DOES cap the uploads, whatever they are saying!
- kakao5 years agoExplorer | Level 4
I have 2 win10 pc using the same dropbox account, one in my office, the other at home. Both are running on Gigabit Internet connection. The pc in the office is able to get 80~100MB/s download speed, but the one at home never gets more than 20MB/s. There is nothing wrong with my home pc, connection speed is great with every other thing I do. For example, when I transfer files to the same AWS bucket, both pc can perform similarly at ~80MB/s.
I notice from the 'resource monitor', the office dropbox seems to be able to open more parallel TCP 'connections'...office pc can open 8~9, but home pc only open 5-6.
That's the only difference I spot so far, but I have no idea how dropbox determines these hidden settings, and how to change that. If anyone knows, please share your idea. Thanks.
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