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Too high disk activity

Too high disk activity

M. A.1
New member | Level 1

While I'm using my computer normally without touching anything Dropbox related, the Dropbox process (I have a system monitor installed that shows disk usage and which process is using it the most among other things) randomly and strangely frequently uses large amounts of my HDD's processing capacity to a point where it causes stuttering in video playback, video games, and other applications that have higher priority for my computer use. This was also verified by simply shutting down Dropbox, since the problem goes away with that.

Since I'm the only user of this account as well, I'm the only one causing changes to it, so there's no new files being received or files being modified which are pushed to me to cause any of this either.

Also, I don't have an anti-virus installed that performs real-time scanning on reads/writes to interfere with this.

I presume this is Dropbox scanning the folders for changes, but I don't think it should cause this much disk activity or at least not such huge spikes for it. And I'm fairly sure the OS has file system notification API (change notifications, like Linux has inotify) that would remove the need to scan the file system for changes in such old fashioned and resource intense manner.

34 Replies 34

Re: Too high disk activity

Jesse P.
New member | Level 1

This sounds like EXACTLY my problem!

Re: Too high disk activity

John-Michael Z.
New member | Level 1

Same here - Dropbox is killing me with extremely high disk usage

Re: Too high disk activity

Bob S.51
New member | Level 1

This happens to me, causing 100% disk usage, even though it is not really doing anything.  When I end task dropbox, the problem goes away.

Re: Too high disk activity

ozan u.
New member | Level 1

Also I have same problem. I think thats happen because of keeping lots of files on dropbox. If you changing anything on that folder(s), then dropbox go crazy for trying index operation. Dropbox should change indexing structure...

Re: Too high disk activity

Darrin R.
Helpful | Level 5

Dropbox disk usage gets 100% quite often. Have to shut it down when I want to get work done otherwise it slows down everything.

Re: Too high disk activity

Anders P.
New member | Level 1

I have this problem too on Win 10. It makes things really rather slow. I'd really like to have Dropbox just running in the background so that there's no hassle, but that is difficult now

Re: Too high disk activity

Per Øyvind H.
Explorer | Level 4

I've found Dropbox to be the no 1 cause of "beachballing" on my MacBook Pro. With Dropbox active on an account it adds at least a minute or two of waiting before the mac is usable after login, and the computer is literately unusable for other tasks whenever the Dropbox-process is trying to do anything. If I disable Dropbox, performance is back to normal. I can perform heavy I/O operations such as recursive copying of directory-trees with hundreds of gigabytes of data from one drive to another, or to/from a local server, with next to no impact on application/desktop performance, so it makes little sense for Dropbox to completely clog the system to do its job.

Re: Too high disk activity

Bill C.17
Helpful | Level 5

100% disk  as I download 200,000 files at a very high speed connection 70 mgpsec download

3 days at 100% and still no where close when I normally expect it to take 8 hours.

have to shut down dropbox to get any work done

second highest are system and compressed memory

time control library

 

Re: Too high disk activity

Jipsa G.
New member | Level 1

Since installing Windows 10 I'm having issues with Dropbox and 100% disk usage too.

Whenever I close Dropbox, the issue is gone.

Is anyone at Dropbox doing anything about this??

I am a paid user.

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