Forum Discussion

zephyr707's avatar
zephyr707
Helpful | Level 7
10 months ago

Dropbox-lnx.x86_64-218.4.4348 is stuck at "Starting..."

I feel like I have had this issue before, but can't remember the solution. Searching around it seems like there are a lot of similar issues with "Starting..." as dropboxd status and never resolves to...
desktop
Linux
Nancy's avatar
Nancy
Icon for Dropbox Community Moderator rankDropbox Community Moderator
10 months ago

Thanks for posting on our Community, zephyr707! Welcome back.

I’m afraid that it’s necessary for the Dropbox app to update regularly to the latest app version, not only to have access to the latest features, but for enhanced security, as well.

To check this further though, I’d like you to right-click on your local Dropbox folder and send me a screenshot of its properties. More specifically, I’d like to know if it contains more than 300k files. 

Let me know once you have more info.

  • zephyr707's avatar
    zephyr707
    Helpful | Level 7
    10 months ago

    Hi Nancy,

    Thanks for your reply. I have 101460 items according to the properties. 90308 files, 195 symlinks, 10957 directories according to find command in terminal. I've just noticed that this dropbox process pegs my CPU and then eats memory until it takes over all available memory and then swaps me out until OOM killer takes over and starts killing my other programs. Not sure what's going on here, but I've stopped the process and closed dropbox, it never left the spinning loading icon with "Starting..."

    Does your team have any logs or anything to debug? I always sense there is just going to be the common solution of doing the big reinstall, which, as I've mentioned in my first post, is not desirable due to using a lot of selective sync that becomes cumbersome to re-implement. Is there a way to export folders marked for selective sync to a file and re-import that file after reinstalling?

    thank you

    • zephyr707's avatar
      zephyr707
      Helpful | Level 7
      10 months ago

      in ~/.dropbox/logs/3 there are a lot of files and they keep generating new ones even though the program is stalled. these are all data files and can not be read, but 3-4 are created each minute. any way to debug these files to see what is going on? 

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