Too high disk activity

[M. A.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.

[gregrobson]

Aha! Finally - confirmation! I've spent hours trying to track this down (I even swapped my desktop unit thinking it might be a dodgy disk).

I used the GUI for the Windows Peformance Toolkit by Google (scroll down to the Oct 12, 2015 post by MoRbldBoY) linked on this page: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-hardware/how-to-fix-100-disk-usage-in-w...

What do I see? 100% usage and Dropbox is all over the place. I pause sync and the disk usage drops, unpause and it's soon at 100% again. I'm using SmartSync so there's hardly any I/O transfer.

How has this issue existed for so long Dropbox? I hope my boss can get our OneDrive issues sorted in the next few days: then we can say goodbye to this.

Hopefully this sample of trace might give one of your devs a clue!

[Levi]

@gregrobson Even with smartsync dropbox still needs to scan all the placeholder files. In my own case there's 1000's of them. Even though they're only a few bytes it still seems to take forever.

[gregrobson]

@Levi - yes same here. Thankfully I don't need it much and the company is moving to OneDrive. I can get away with the web version until then. Just seems odd that nobody at Dropbox has picked this up.

I did notice that even SmartSync was slow as well.

[Norah]

Hi gregrobson, Levi and motionmind, welcome to Dropbox Community!

As this is an issue that needs thorough investigation could you raise a ticket with our team here so that we can troubleshoot further for you? 

Once you’ve raised the ticket please include the ID and I’ll make sure that a colleague handles your case asap. 

Thanks in advance for your reply!

[mjohnson86]

Go ahead and add me to the ticket as well.  This isn't a new issue, I think its a systemic one, most likely related to the root logic of how dropbox works.  I loose 20-30 minutes every morning because of this.. and we are only using 2% of the 10 TB that we have access too... if we actually utilized what we paid for I'd have to login to my computer on friday to be able to start monday morning.

You guys did 1.1 billion in revenue last year... you aren't a startup anymore... put your big boy pants on and step up to the plate, or google will beat you since they probably dropped that much on latte's and granola last year for the crew.

[This thread is now closed by moderators due to inactivity. If you're experiencing a similar behavior, feel free to start a new discussion in the Dropbox Community here.]