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Re: Slow Startup

Desktop app is slow when starting up, and slows down the computer while doing so

Quang N.3
New member | Level 1
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Why does it take so long to start up dropbox? While it's starting up, other programs are very slow, almost unresponsive. It takes over 20 minutes to show starting/syncing completed. I have 16gb ram, window 7. The start up speed is critical during such time as trying to use the computer to print items for meeting and it freezes up because dropbox is starting and you cannot even stop it from starting, of course there's the option of exiting.

40 Replies 40

Carsten N.1
New member | Level 1
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It seems that Dropbox support - ignore this serious problem. We are using dropbox buisness on all computers in our company, and this problem occurs on all the computers. If the problem is not solved in a month, we would cancel all our accounts, and switch to another cloud service. We are already testing some other cloud services, that until now seems to work properly, and also is cheaper..
The problem cost us a lot of money, because we can not use our computers - in the first 30 minutes, after they have been started. Because of the problem, we have been forced to uninstall the program from all our external laptops etc. - used by sales people. The sales people can not wait 30 minutes, when they are visiting customers.

Ann A.
New member | Level 2
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The Macintosh computers in our design office take approx 30-40 mins every morning for Dropbox to startup, regardless of wether there's been activity overnight or not. We are running El Capitan with the latest version of Dropbox. The Dropbox icon displays the 'Starting...' message and the whole system slows while Dropbox does whatever it is doing. I have a 1TB Dropbox and it's about 20% full. The start up time has progressively been getting longer to the point where we're facing 40mins of downtime every morning.

Any suggestions on how we can speed this up? This is a major problem for us and costing us money.

Jonathan L.27
New member | Level 1
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I am having the same issue. On my laptop, which is running Win10 and really runs nothing at startup other than the basic Windows utilities, it takes upwards of 40 minutes just to get past the "Starting..." phase. Then there's the "Downloading file list" phase, which can take another 15-20 minutes. I have a lot of stuff in my Dropbox folder (about 150 GB), but that shouldn't affect the startup time and it should have a minimal effect at best on the time it takes to download an index of files, especially when I haven't made any changes between boot-ups! Same problem existed in Win8 before I upgraded. This is ridiculous! What the hell am I paying for?! Oh, and of course no one at Dropbox says anything. Worst customer service I've encountered in a long time. Maybe put them in the same category as Dell.

James O.11
New member | Level 1
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also having same issue, very long "starting" and computer pretty much unresponsive in the meantime. 10% of 1Tb DB used, on a 2012 iMac everything up to date. Would be good to see an answer from Dropbox here. Due to problems with other software (Adobe Creative Cloud) crashing on start, I seem to be doing a lot of restarts lately and the Dropbox starting time is really bugging me.  

Carsten N.3
New member | Level 1
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It seems that Dropbox will not solve this problem, or answer the many users who have this problem. 
Poor customerservice. 😞
I cannot recommend dropbox to any professional users.

John N.19
New member | Level 1
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Not sure why, but dropbox.com is as slow as an 8086 processor and it is significantly impacting our use. Takes 30 seconds + to move between displayed photos and I wait and wait for the opportunity to add a comment in order to collaborate with colleagues.  Has Dropbox decided it's too big to fail? 

James H.63
New member | Level 1
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Same here - Macbook Pro with extra memory and no bandwidth issues.  Its a little disheartening to see that Dropbox support has pretty much ignored this issue.  It does have my team looking for alternate solution because this really is bovine feces.

Admin 1.1
New member | Level 1
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Experiencing the exact same problems! It's unacceptable in the business world and needs to be addressed ASAP. What are some other cloud systems you guys recommend? 

Yuri O.2
New member | Level 1
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I have the same problem, mostly because my HDD is encrypted and it takes a lot of effort from Dropbox to uncrypt and hash the files to sync.
The best solution I found at the moment is to set Dropbox process as low priority: https://www.nixtutor.com/linux/changing-priority-on-linux-processes/

Fabio G.2
New member | Level 1
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I have the same problem here and still no response by the Dropbox support.

 

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