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Desktop App Severely Affecting System Performance
I love Dropbox. I can't say I've messed around with a bunch of different cloud storage services, but Dropbox has been more or less great for me for years. However, recently the desktop application ha...
This sounds exactly like my issue. Things are slow because Dropbox is totally thrashing the registry. Right-clicking on the desktop (or opening the Start Menu) requires checking a few dozen registry entries, but Dropbox's indexing causes a kind of denial-of-service attack on the Windows registry.
Dropbox support was pretty cool when we started talking offline and we were able to track it down to Windows being the real troublemaker. When Dropbox checks a file during re-sync, it sends out a request to Windows to update the little icon in the corner (green checkmark, etc.).
Historically, this was fine. Maybe(?) after the latest Windows 10 update (that's my guess; the Dropbox team reported they haven't been able to reproduce the behavior), that exact same "hey, Windows, update that file's icon" request now involves checking the registry for four values, which ends up closer to thirty actual registry operations. Who knows why. Windows doesn't seem to cache the values, so it repeats the check for every file. And Dropbox seems to update the whole folder hierarchy's icons each time (despite alleged "deduplicating logic"), so you end up with something close to 150 registry calls per file in your Dropbox!
No known workaround.
All we'd need is an "I don't want icon overlays" option in Dropbox and this problem would disappear. Alternatively: Windows could fix its broken code.
Lusil
Dropbox Staff
Dropbox StaffHey everyone, apologies for missing your replies and thank you for nudging me back.
If you're still having issues with your computer experiencing an overall slow-down, could you have a look at this article and let me know if any of the suggestions mentioned there apply to you?
Let me know what you find, thanks!
I'm not sure what's going on, but DropBox this past year has been ridiculously slow.
And this is with an upgraded computer (3900x, 64GB DDR4 RAM, Phison 16 PCiE NVMe SSDs with crazy fast write/read speeds and Fios up/download speeds). And yes, I checked all my settings and re-downloaded the application.
When I use the application on my desktop, DropBox is just VERY SLOW when browsing and accessing files (compared to 2017-2018 DropBox on my OLDER computer!). I can't open them in a Windows explorer window or Mac folder window as I previously could in 2018-early2019. Please somehow get us back to that previous version of DropBox. We want that easy drag-and-drop-into-folder-window DropBox that we liked so much before we subscribed to it.
- Daphne
Dropbox Community Moderator
Hey Duckysaurus, can you let me know if you've taken a look at this article that Lusil mentioned earlier in this thread?
Also, could you let me know which version of the app you have installed at the moment? You'll see the version number when hovering over the Dropbox icon in your menu bar/system tray.
Keep me posted!
