Need to see if your shared folder is taking up space on your dropbox 👨💻? Find out how to check here.
Forum Discussion
Solved
Excessive RAM usage while syncing large files
Hi Folks, I typically sync pretty large files (image backups) and these can be as much as 250 GB+ in size. While syncing, I notice that Dropbox reserves a seriously huge amount of memory, like the ...
large file syncing in dropbox often shows high ram usage because of how blocks are mapped and checksummed before upload it’s not the same as a straight ftp copy since dropbox breaks files into chunks for deduplication and recovery if the mapping isn’t optimized it can create a memory bottleneck during sync the actual app footprint stays small but the process of chunking big files can eat ram fast limiting other tasks
Megan
Dropbox Community Moderator
Dropbox Community ModeratorHey there, MikeB1971, I hope you're doing well!
Let's see what we can do about that. As a first step, can you clarify the OS you're using, along with the app's version, and syncing status?
We need to ensure you're using a stable version, and a supported OS, and then proceed with the next steps.
Keep me posted, and we'll take it from there!
Hi Megan,
Many thanks for the super-speedy reply!
Sure thing.
I'm on Windows 11, app version 186.4.6207 and my sync status is paused, more on that in sec.
About the sync status: I found that when I have syncing paused, memory usage drops to normal. At the moment it's about 40%, which is typical during a working day. But when syncing was on earlier, it rose to 90% or so. As said before, it is specifically the file being uploaded that causes this memory jump. If I use RAMMap, I can see that the Mapped File memory usage goes way up to something like 16 GB.
Perhaps this is just how things are on Windows or whatever, but it would be good to know that. I would then just leave syncing off during the day for (very) large files.
Thanks,
Mike
