Forum Discussion

jeanzbeanz's avatar
jeanzbeanz
Helpful | Level 5
9 years ago
Solved

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...
desktop
sync
upload
windows
  • Jane's avatar
    Jane
    9 years ago
    Hey walwar, 
     
    Let me send over some more details and tips to determine the cause!
     
    • For starters, you may have a look here for some steps to adjust your bandwidth locally. 
    • Secondly, you could try force quitting all other applications and see if this helps improving your syncing speed. 
    • Also, let me ask you whether you’re in a work or home environment. 
    • You could use the link below to check your connection speed through your ISP and local network by using the following link: http://www.speedtest.net/
     
    I’ll be following-up here, so please keep me updated in your reply! 
Douglas S.'s avatar
Douglas S.
New member | Level 1
11 years ago

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!

Rich's avatar
Rich
Icon for Super User II rankSuper User II
10 years ago

Remember to do the conversions before comparing your speed numbers. While most ISPs and speed test sites display their results in bits (kilo or mega), the speeds reported by Dropbox are in bytes. Be sure to do the conversion before comparing. Your 3000 KB/sec speed is approximately 24Mb/sec, which is plenty fast. Not to mention that under real world conditions you'll never get 100Mb/sec. The speed of your connection is only guaranteed to your ISP. Beyond their network they can't guarantee those speeds as there are too many other factors to take into consideration; distance between you and the server you're communicating with, that server's uplink speed (you can't download at 100Mb if they can't upload at 100Mb), congestion on third-party networks that your traffic is traveling on, etc.

And finally, each file that you upload is hashed, compressed, then transferred, encrypted, and stored on the Dropbox servers. That entire process is included in the aggregate KB/s speed that's displayed in the Dropbox sync status. i.e. It's not just the network speed you're seeing.

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