Dropbox on older mac slow to start

[TxDuster]

I'd like to better understand what happens on start. My colleague and I have similar 27inch imacs. Mine has the hybrid drive and his is a bit older and is traditional spinning disk. Dropbox is set nearly identically on both. When starting the icon in the menu bar is gray. This slows my machine down a bit but nearly totally blocks his completely. Mine takes about 4 minutes and his is consistently 15min or more. When he restarts his computer, he knows he can't do anything until dropbox "Starts". 

Syncing is fine. Once the icon turns black and then shows the sync symbol, the computer runs normally so SYNC is NOT the problem. 

What does it mean when dropbox is "Starting"? What is it doing? It may help me figure out what is going on with his machine. Activity Monitor really doesn't give me much of a clue. Energy saver just shows that dropbox is the utility using the most energy during startup. I'm really not much of one to pour over log files so I haven't done a dump of the console to look there.

Any clues as to what happens during "Dropbox is Starting" on a Mac would be helpful.

TxDuster

[Jay]

Hi @TxDuster, thanks for messaging the Community!

Generally, this can occur for several reasons, including having more than 300,000 files in your account.

This article on the site might be able to shed some light on what is causing the slow startup.

Hope this helps!