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Dropbox is not uploading or uploading very slowly
I have dropbox installed on multiple devices and they all work fine, except it has suddenly stopped uploading on my windows laptop.
I moved a load of photos off my phone onto dropbox on my laptop l...
I have a 5MB upload hard wired internet. Yet when I upload large files using my desktop application, I'm only getting 10-66kb transfer speeds. Why so slow? My ISP has checked and found nothing wrong with my service. Is Dropbox "throttling back" my upload speed? There are no other devises being used that would reduce band width. Please help!
Matthias,
I think there are two possible explanations which are consistent with all the evidence:
1)
The first possibility is that it is an intermittent problem with Dropbox's servers, but that most existing users don't notice because they're using Dropbox the same way I am, which is:
- a huge initial upload (70 GB in my case), where if the upload speed is slow, it's a major problem
- thereafter, only incremental uploads when a file is added or changed, so slow speeds are less of an issue and the user might not even notice
So during the most recent flurry of messages on this thread when people were complaining about slow speeds (late December to early January), maybe a lot of their long-time users were also getting slow speeds but just didn't happen to notice because they were only using it for incremental backups at that point, and long ago they had done their initial huge upload during a period when it Dropbox's servers were working.
Were you using Dropbox regularly in late-December-early-January, and do you specifically remember uploading large files on multiple occasions, and observing a fast upload speed as reported by the Dropbox client?
If you did, then you're correct, this indicates it's not a problem with Dropbox's servers, which brings up the second possibility:
2)
And that is that out of all the Dropbox client installs, a certain proportion of the time the client just simply doesn't work properly, even when the user is doing everything right. Bob P just mentioned that he discovered it was because it was fighting with Windows Search. Or it could be for some other reason. But it's still Dropbox's responsibility because it's their client that is not working correctly.
In either case, looking at the messages in this thread from Jeff N. and Encore P. and Bill A. on the first page, and from Ricardo T. and Bob B. on this page if you scroll up a bit, it seems pretty clear that they're all technically informed people who are probably not missing something obvious (in particular, we all un-checked the speed-throttling box and we all ran an upload speed test). If Dropbox isn't working for people who are that well informed, then it's probably an issue with Dropbox, whether it's the server or the client.
