Mac slows down on starting with paid Dropbox.

[pmeier]

I have to wait on my macs (27" and two 13" Macbook, three and four years old, newest systems) almost 10 to 15 Minutes until i can use other apps, as dropbox syncs so slow the list. After list is loaded, the file syncing is in normal speed.

An update to the next level (where Smartsync is possible) is too expensive.

So what to do?

Best regards

Josef

[Jane]

Glad to see that you got this squared away Shaun (@Shaun S.10) & thanks for looping back here to let me know of the progress. Please don’t hesitate to post us again on our Community in the future in case you have more thoughts or questions!

I also appreciate it that you circled back to me on this discussion here Nick (Nick_zz); let me follow-up a bit more closely from where we had left off! 

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I do have a lot of files (2 million) but am only using a fraction of the total storage. 

Now, it would be worth rephrasing that the performance of the Dropbox desktop app can decline if you have more than 300,000 files synced to your computer. This is a soft limit and depends highly on the hardware specifications of the computer running the app. 

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(1) it is available on different machines and (2) you don't have to decide what to do with old folders due to lack of capacity. 

While you can store as many files as you have storage space for on your account online Nick, you may not be able to sync all those files to your computer, as this may affect the overall resources allocation. 

I hope that this brings a bit more clarity to your inquiry & please let me know here if you have more questions or I've misunderstood your description in any way. Wishing you a wonderful month ahead! 

[andrew-jeremy]

It is not a solution. In a year or so, you will be back where you started. Dropbox is [profanity removed by moderation according to the Community Guidelines]  and have a top tier membership version which I am giving up because of this. I am sick of it.

[Nick_zz]

I have an update to my original issue. Following one of the user suggestions, I upgraded my (mid-2010 "cheese grater") Mac to SSD storage. Between that and switching to "smart sync" and online storage (whatever it is called, when the files are downloaded only when you use them) my problem is mostly gone. 

Obviously, this might not work for everyone. In this respect I concur that upgrading your hardware is not a "solution" in the sense you would expect from the support / troubleshooting discussion group for a software product. Rather, it is an acknowledgement of the lack of a software type solution.

It is likely that someone who can't afford $2-3k to buy a new computer or spend ~$500 on SSD's and memory upgrades, will be also unable to afford a paid Dropbox account. It probably makes sense financially to let those broke and / or stingy customers fend for themselves (especially the ones with several million files). 

But you never know, some kid in Finland might just be working on a cloud storage system that also keeps track of the metadata of your files on every one of your computers so it doesn't have to rebuild the database or whatever each time the user logs in. 

[Shaun S.10]

There is no solution other than upgrading your system to include an SSD drive that I can find. If you don’t like that than you can use Dropbox without the app.

[Nick_zz]

Thank you Shaun S.10 for the info on upgrading the storage to SSD. As I mentioned, that solved the issue for me as well. Previously I had increased the memory to 64GB and that didn't make a lot of difference. Switching to online-only storage for most files also helped, but I think it was really the switch from HDD to SSD that did the trick. 

[rdheaney]

This has been an issue for years with Dropbox. I guess they just have no idea how to fix it. I'm upgrading to SSDs on my 2012 MBP just to "reduce" the effect of this. 

[pmeier]

SSD is a really good idea!

Maybe this is the solution. Only the time to set up the new SSD with the old system is enormous. 

[Stephdell]

Hi please can you help. Dropbox has just started zapping my Mac on stRr up. I cannot do anything and it is taking an age to sync. I’m running the latest iOS and have never had this problem before. It’s been happening all week and has taken up most of my work week trying to sort it

[Shaun S.10]

Does your computer have an HDD or SSD? If you have an HDD you may choose option not to have Dropbox run at startup. This will help your computer boot. Once it boots you could manually start Dropbox. However, this is the same issue I had and the only solution that seems to be working is upgrading to a decent SSD. I choose to upgrade the entire laptop to Apples latest 15 mbp. That worked like a charm. The software is using lots of hard drive resources these days and can truly benefit from SSD.

[mtherien]

The trick of starting dropbox in Terminal (or *.command script) seems to solve the freezing issue at dropbox startup due to cpu hog.

Problem was happening regularly, every month or so on 2019 macmini with 1TB ssd and 64gig ram. Sometimes dropbox failed to start at all. Not sure if issue returns everytime dropbox is updated. On each launch Was getting warning "Dropbox was downloaded from internet". Maybe fixed by:  sudo chown -R  $USER /Applications/Dropbox*

Also, When started from Terminal it does not seem  freeze up the mac, so possible work-around.

1.  Create file named /Users/Shared/DropboxDelayedStart.command as follows...

In TextEdit -> Make plain text, (or nano) paste in following and save-as /Users/Shared/DropboxDelayedStart.command

sleep 20
echo "Starting Dropbox after 20 second delay"
sleep 5
/Applications/Dropbox.app/Contents/MacOS/Dropbox

2. In Terminal:

chmod a+x/Users/Shared/DropboxDelayedStart.command

3 Quit dropbox, then double-click /Users/Shared/DropboxDelayedStart.command  and it should start dropbox after 20-sec delay. If not double-check steps above.

4. Once you know Delayed start works, then  In SysPrefs: Users: Login Items,  remove Dropbox and add /Users/Shared/DropboxDelayedStart.command