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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 has been making certain aspects of my computer unusably slow. I say "certain aspects" because really it's not the whole thing. To be honest, the only thing I've notied is right clicking. It sounds silly, but this really does make your computer frustratingly slow when you're trying to work with files in Windows Explorer. I can navigate Windows Explorer with no lag, but when I right click anywhere (including my Desktop) there is a 10+ second delay to bring up the list of commands.
This problem only occurs when the app is indexing files. When it is fully synced and not indexing, everything seems to return to normal. I've also had what I've seen to be a somewhat common problem where indexing hangs up. But the right click delay is still there even when it is successfully indexing as well.
Is there a solution to this problem? I know there are options to limit bandwidth by the app, but I see nothing for controlling the indexing function. Thanks for your help.
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.
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- Lusil
Dropbox Staff
Hey 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!
This is really not a fix.
Can someone explain what the heck is going on??? I am having the same issue. Whenever I try to access files through the Dropbox Windows Client using the File Explorer, it will literally take 30 seconds every time I try to open a folder or a file.
- Lusil
Hey meguia, thanks for nudging us on this thread.
I'd be more than happy to look into this with you if you'd like.
If you've already had a look at the article I mention above, could you let me know what you see when you hover over the Dropbox icon that's next to your computer's clock?
Looking forward to hearing back from you!
I did - and while on live chat with Pierce from Dropbox we had checked CPU usage and that was not a factor. After trying everything the first layer of help from Dropbox provided, including links like these...
1) I deleted dropbox, rebooted and re-installed.
2) I deleted onedrive, and checked to see how Dropbox was behaving. It was now behaving fine.
3) I rebooted and re-installed onedrive.
All programs seem to be running fine.
This issue was previously fixed by deleting folders from Registration Entries. From reading other threads, including this one, Dropbox knows it has a Registration Entries problem with Windows. Please fix that, because it will keep happening in the future. Unless that bug is actually Microsoft trying to kill dropbox because their OneDrive program sucks. I can't help you there.
- Lusil
Thanks for letting me know, and great work with the troubleshooting!
Since you're investigating this with a member of our team, I'd recommend continuing with them, as they'd be able to have a better look into this for you, using out internal tools.
I've made sure pass your comments along to them, so as soon as they have additional information on the matter, they'll get back to you via email.
In the meantime, could you also check if you have any pending updates on your computer's OS?
Thanks again!
I dont. Both Office, Windows 10 Pro, and Dropbox were up to date. I'm not 100% on OneDrive but I don't thik that it wouldnt be because everything is set to update automatically.
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!
