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kamadforge's avatar
kamadforge
Explorer | Level 4
2 years ago

RAM memory usage goes through the roof

I'm using Ubuntu. Dropbix used to work fine on my system but recently something happened and when trying to sync files, the memory usage rapidly increases to max up 32 GB RAM, and then the system fre...
desktop
Linux
skalhoef's avatar
skalhoef
New member | Level 2
2 months ago

I was having the same problem with my Dropbox (Ubuntu 25.04). It happened right after I created some thousands (maybe also tens of thousands; I removed them all now) of *small* files (each about 1 kB large) within a couple of minutes for some project that I am working on.

The crash happened basically right after this... I tried a little bit around with ChatGPT, but nothing seemed to work and I ended up reformatting my computer... Since dropbox was synced up to the point prior to the creation of the files, I made the experiment and created the files again by running my python-script and the issue re-appeared. I constantly ran out of memory... I then increased the SWAP and the application required about 32 GB of memory in total to just "sync" (or "index" or so)... There was zero apparent progress (monitored through "dropbox status" even after hours...) Even if I pressed "stop syncing" or removed these thousands of files from my local computer, I would run into the memory issues... Somehow the application was "broken" after crashing once... So I ended up reformatting twice within 24 hours.

But at least in my case: Reformatting the computer was a silver bullet solution... In the future, I will avoid the creation of masses of files within short minutes.

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