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Dropbox not uploading/ uploading v slow
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!
For the record, with a 2Gbps down/ 1Gbps up fiber connection running on a 2013 mac pro here in Tokyo, My upload speeds are hovering around 25Mbps. (I get roughly double this speed when uploading to amazon cloud drive via their desktop app). When using speed test on a regional server I regularly get over 900Mbps each way (my Gigabit ethernet to the modem is the bottleneck on the down stream). Even when connecting to a server in Palo Alto I get around 500Mbps up/750mbps down (though the ping is admittedly about 10 times longer).
http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/4870575906
Even if connecting to California were much slower, now that you have an office in Tokyo, I'd suggest that lack of global infrastructure on DropBox's part (read: servers in east Asia) won't really hold water, particularly when you're trying to attract clients in such a well connected part of the world.
To the dropbox team, if utilizing 1/20th of upstream bandwidth, and and being half as fast as the dismally slow competition is where you intend to be then I guess there's not much need to discuss things further, but I think the frustration in this thread is because customers love everything else about the product so much, it's a shame to have it handicapped this way.
I concede there are a lot of variables, but I think it's safe to say most of the people who have gotten all the way to page three of this thread have already double checked their bandwidth limiter settings in drop box and know what their ISP's upstream is. You dove a slightly deeper on your post back in *August* so let me dress some of those points:
August 28, 2015 17:03
- the desktop application's bandwidth settings (what speed you choose for the upload/download limits)
>we’ve all checked this… no limits either way (the fact that limits are all denoted in kbps speaks volumes in itself)
- your geographic location, particular ISP, and service plan
>Tokyo… probably the fastest internet city in the world after Seul, Sonet Nuro, 2^bps down/1Gbps up
- the route your ISP provides between your computer and Dropbox servers.
>a little hard for me to determine since you didn’t tell us where those are, but assuming you have some in the bay area, the ping is 139ms, and transfer speeds are in the 500Mbps~750Mbps range
It's also important to distinguish between the speed your ISP advertises (typically the maximum possible, not an in-practice average) and the speed "speed tests" report (usually calculated using the speed test server located closest to your geographic location)
> see above
from the actual speed of the ISP-provided route between your computer and Dropbox servers. If you are far away from the Dropbox servers, if the route of the connection to the server suffers from congestion,
>see above
if you're using wi-fi or ethernet cables,
>direct Gigabit ethernet on less than 10 meters of CAT6e.
there’s a lot of things that could explain why you experience slow speed.
>and SOME of those things are DropBox’s responsibility
Additionally, most consumer ISPs provide 1/10th the upload speed compared to advertised download speed and some ISPs may throttle sustained connections.
>not in here.
Two things that could be relevant as well:
- The speed the Dropbox app is showing is an aggregated speed of hashing, indexing and uploading so it also depends on your computer performances for example.
>The speed istat menus shows is absolute bandwidth utilization
> Mac Pro D700 with 4xPCie SSD, 32Gb of Ram and 6core multithreading processor DB is utilizing 48% of one of the cores
- The speed the client is displaying is in KBps (kilo bytes per sec) while ISPs (and speed tests) often display speed in Mbps (Mega bits per sec) it means that you have to multiply Dropbox' speed by 125 to compare it with the ISP's/speed tests.
>thanks for the reminder but we’re apples to apples here… (X)bps
Unfortunately, we cannot diagnose speed issues based on speedtests such as the ones you can find on the internet, but a good thing to check to dive deeper, would be to try to upload two files of the same size; one via the website and one via the desktop application (one at a time).
>I think we’ve already done a lot of the user-end diagnosis for you, so at this point that’s not really what this thread is about. It’s about you acknowledging what you expect the upper limit of performance to be on your backend servers.
If the upload via the website is way faster than via the desktop application, I'd definitely recommend writing in to support at https://www.dropbox.com/support and let us know the exact name of the files you tested.
>given the 10GB file size cap, web upload doesn’t always help, but it’s nice to know that’s your criterion for bypassing some of the newB support questionnaire.
So if after over 6 plus months of this thread there's no "fix" perhaps it's reasonable to assume that this is a feature, rather than a bug. So to the folks at DropBox, could you tell us in the best case scenario.. with a hypothetical customer with google fiber and living just down the street from your server farm... what kind of performance do you expect to deliver? I'm willing to chalk up say a 50% performance hit due to distance, but if someone on google fiber just down the block from you getting a 50Mbps upload actually sounds good to you, just tell us that so we can move on. If that seems below your own expectations, then as others have suggested, I think you have some work to do.
