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Forum Discussion
Dropbox app on File Provider using 6GB of RAM while the app is updated, and not syncing.
I have a lot of files (>370K) but vast majority are online only after trying to address this issue via solutions in other threads. I have 134GB of local files and maybe 500gb more are online-only.
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Yeah, that RAM usage definitely sounds high, especially with syncing idle. Dropbox on macOS has had memory management issues for a while, and large libraries (hundreds of thousands of files) make it worse.
A couple of things you could try:
- Rebuild the Dropbox index: Quit Dropbox completely, then restart while holding down the Option key. This can sometimes clear stuck cache/index processes.
- Clear Dropbox cache: Delete the .dropbox.cache folder inside your Dropbox directory—Dropbox will rebuild it on restart.
- Limit indexing scope: If possible, move some large/rarely-used folders to “online only” and see if memory pressure improves.
- Beta channel: Some users report better performance on the Dropbox beta build, which has fixes for memory leaks on Apple Silicon.
Even then, with 370k+ files, Dropbox will always use more RAM than average—it keeps a huge index in memory. If performance gets too disruptive, some users split their libraries across accounts or use selective sync as a workaround.
