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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 don't have an axe to grind against Dropbox, but I'm looking for an explanation that is consistent with all the evidence, and multiple people have posted on this thread that:
- they were getting unacceptably slow upload speeds to Dropbox
- they had already disabled throttling in the Dropbox client
- they did a speed test confirming that their ISP upload speed was much faster than they were getting from Dropbox
- the technical details that they posted, as well as their credentials in some cases, suggested that they knew what they were doing (and I would optimistically like to think of myself as included in this group)
I do not think it's consistent with this evidence to assume that all the problem reports are due to user error or slow ISP speeds.
On the other hand, many users have reported fast upload speeds at least some of the time. (I myself just started uploading a 100 MB test file and got reported upload speeds of about 1 MB per second -- yes capital-B bytes.) I think this rules out some other explanations -- for example, it rules out the idea that the physical pipe to Dropbox is just too slow to handle all of their customer traffic (because in that case it would be slow all of the time, not just some of the time).
So I think the main possibilities at this point are:
1) Dropbox frequently experiences periods of slow connection speeds -- sometimes lasting several days, which is how long I spent trying in vain to do a bulk upload the first time -- but it works well the rest of the time. Many users just don't notice the slow connection speed periods, if they did one initial huge upload during a time when Dropbox happened to be working, and then use it for small incremental backups after that.
2) Some proportion of the time, there is a problem with the Dropbox client install, or there is some attribute of a particular user's setup, which is not an error by the user but which causes Dropbox not to work properly. This is not a server-side problem but it should still be Dropbox's responsibility to fix it.
In particular, perhaps Dropbox uploads much slower when uploading a large number of small files, than when uploading one large file. I had originally planned on doing more experimenting to test for something like that, but I didn't have any more time to keep diagnosing bugs in Dropbox.
