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donbongo's avatar
donbongo
Explorer | Level 4
4 years ago

Incredibly high CPU and battery usage by Dropbox App on Mac

I have the dropbox app installed on my 2019 MacBook Pro and for weeks now I've noticed CPU usage above 100% on my machine, which often causes the fans to spin up to insane levels (thank you intel Macs for being thermally garbage) at all hours of the day, often in the middle of the night after being asleep for hours. More recently I've had my Mac drain power to zero while plugged into power. This happened once while the computer was fully asleep and then again today while under normal browser usage. Activity monitor showed intense CPU and Energy usage by Dropbox in both these cases.

 

I've tried reducing the number of files in my local dropbox significantly with Selective Sync to no avail. There are no sync issues. Dropbox doesn't even appear to be syncing most of the time.

 

I have one external disk backing up to a business dropbox account and two dropbox accounts synced to my Mac. This app is becoming a huge drain on my computer and productivity.

desktop
Mac

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  • donbongo's avatar
    donbongo
    Explorer | Level 4
    3 years ago

    still happening for me! Another day where my battery is annihilated in minutes while plugged into power. Fix your broken app, dropbox.

     

  • rmiz's avatar
    rmiz
    Explorer | Level 3
    3 years ago

    The strange thing for me is that I seem to have this problem at home primarily but not at work. I can't figure out if it's something to do with my home internet interacting strangely with Dropbox.

  • jimmytwoshoes1234's avatar
    jimmytwoshoes1234
    New member | Level 2
    2 years ago

    Not sure if they ever fixed it, I had multiple sync issues and it truly never synced without errors. As I look at it now it still has two errors and it has sat that for a long time. I just gave up trying to get it to work, none of the articles or self help crap actually did anything and dropbox seemed helpless at actually addressing the issue.

    I did recently install the macos dropbox capture app, now that drained my battery from 100% to 0% in two hours flat or less. It was nuts. After just quitting it and leaving it un-opened it my battery life went back to normal. 

    So I will continue to not use it and just use the built in screenshot functionality by mac. 

  • ramensky's avatar
    ramensky
    New member | Level 2
    2 years ago

    I had this issue and seemed to fix it by disabling Preferences > Network > LAN Sync

  • chessman's avatar
    chessman
    New member | Level 2
    2 years ago

    I turned this off but it doesn't seem to be having an effect. Did you find out anything more?

  • ramensky's avatar
    ramensky
    New member | Level 2
    2 years ago
    chessman wrote:

    I turned this off but it doesn't seem to be having an effect. Did you find out anything more?



    No, sorry.

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