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rf44's avatar
rf44
Helpful | Level 5
6 years ago
Solved

Syncing takes more time than normal lately and it's taking some time to start it up upon rebooting

NOTE: I posted this yeserday but it was marked as spam for some reason. To clean up and speed things up, I recently reformatted the hard drive on my Mac and did a complete reinstall of everything i...
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  • Lusil's avatar
    Lusil
    6 years ago

    Thanks for keeping me in the loop throughout this, rf44!

     

    Since you mention that you experienced high CPU usage, could you also have a look at this article, in case any of the listed suggestions help? 

     

    In the meantime, could you also have a look at your Support page to see your options to contacting our team?

     

    Let me know what you find, cheers!

Lusil's avatar
Lusil
Icon for Dropbox Staff rankDropbox Staff
6 years ago

Hi there rf44, thanks for reaching out to us. 

 

As a first step, just to make sure we cover as much initial troubleshooting as possible, could you try the following steps in the exact order listed?

  • Click on the Dropbox icon in your menu bar.
  • Go to the gear in the Notifications panel.
  • Select Preferences...
  • Navigate to the Account tab.
  • Click anywhere in the window under the tab.
  • Hold down the Option/Alt key.
  • Click on Fix Hardlinks (make sure you're still holding down Option/Alt). You may be asked for your computer's login credentials, in which case, please enter them.

At this point, wait a bit to see if Dropbox resumes syncing and, if you're still having trouble, repeat the first six steps, but at the sevent step, select Fix Permissions, instead. 

 

Let me know how it goes, cheers!

  • rf44's avatar
    rf44
    Helpful | Level 5
    6 years ago

    Lusil, 

    Thank you for the quick response and suggestions.   I had alrady fixed HardLinks (which seems to take about a second--is that right?) and permissions (takes a few minutes) but just did all of that again.  I don't believe that hlped last time so we'll see.  

     

    I put together a spreadsheet and pasted part of it below (ignore first row).  As you can see, the "avg files/hr" picked up significantly between 8pm-8am this morning, but then once I started doing things it grinded back down.    My Speedtest still shows 70mbps download, 7mbps upload.   But as mentioned in my original post, "In selective Synch I selected about 14,000 total files for about 29GB" so I have no idea what is going on here.  Please let me know thoughts. 

     

    This has tied up my computer for days, with the CPU constantly maxed out, and it's hard to get anything done.     I don't recall ever having anything like this in the past, other than Dropbox occasionally synching 100s of thousands of files for no apparent reason but that didn't take anywhere near this long.

     

    Please help.  I'm afraid to quit DB now and restart since it. might start all over agin.

    Thank you,

    Ron

     

    TimeFiles LeftElapsed Hr# Files since lastAvg files/hr Est HrsEst Days
    5/12/2020 1:30 PM1,894,13299.50-954,132-9,589 -197.53-8.23
    5/12/2020 2:00 PM1,879,5110.5014,62129,242 64.272.68
    5/12/2020 2:30 PM1,865,9310.5013,58027,160 68.702.86
    5/12/2020 3:00 PM1,856,7550.509,17618,352 101.174.22
    5/12/2020 5:06 PM1,819,0002.1037,75517,979 101.184.22
    5/12/2020 6:20 PM1,799,3721.2319,62815,915 113.064.71
    5/12/2020 8:12 PM1,745,8111.8753,56128,693 60.842.54
    5/13/2020 8:15 AM1,006,77812.05739,03361,331 16.420.68
    5/13/2020 9:00 AM998,0000.758,77811,704 85.273.55
    5/13/2020 10:00 AM988,8541.009,1469,146 108.124.50
    5/13/2020 10:30 AM982,3450.506,50913,018 75.463.14
    • rf44's avatar
      rf44
      Helpful | Level 5
      6 years ago

      Lusil,  I completed the steps you suggested about resetting hardlinks and permissions.   The permissions ended up taking about 30 minutes to complete, at which point the average files per hour shot up to between 60k-154k for a couple of hours but now it's once again slowed to a crawl of around 7k files per hour.    I am working on the computer as I do this but nothing too intensive.

       

      This is a critical problem now.  Please advise on any steps I can take to fix it.

       

      Thank you, Ron

      • rf44's avatar
        rf44
        Helpful | Level 5
        6 years ago

        UPDATE: It appears that my ISP has throttled my speed, probably due to this running for days and also it's prime time.   Speedtest shows download of 6.79mbps (was 70-ish) and upload of 1.5mbps!    So perhaps this will go back up overnight.

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