Re: Dropbox not uploading/ uploading v slow

Have you checked the bandwidth settings in the Dropbox preferences of the desktop app?

Yes. There are no limits on how much bandwidth is used or KB uploaded. I still have not received any response from Dropbox. I tried Google Drive and it was much faster.

Same problem here. 10 MB up shown on speedtest.net. Other services like crash plan will take advantage of the full available upload speed, but dropbox stays around 1700 kb max with no limit and all apps closed.

i have the same problem... i'm using the last version of desktop client and i'm really started to think that i need to change my strorage service, because dropbox can't upload a 10 mb photo in 10 minutes... amazing...

I found that there is a difference in "upload" speed, and "sync" speed. I was dragging files into my Dropbox folder located on my hard drive and found slow "sync" speeds. When I uploaded the file directly to Dropbox via a web browser the speeds were significantly faster. I am supprised that Dropbox tech support didn't ask me about this. I had to find out on my own. So better speeds, not so good tech support.

Dropbox speed sucks... PERIOD and there is nothing you can do about it. Yes, web upload are faster but I have a 175Mbps connection and get no where near 10% of that speed when uploading even with my pro account.

Just be patient ;-)

same problem.
this is unbearable. 8gb in 7days! is it for real? it's faster to send them via dhl in a pendrive

I just upgraded to pro since I don't like any of the other services and I have been using dropbox for years. Now I'm disappointed because I'm uploading at 100kb/s. As mentioned, it would be faster to just mail them a drive...

Are you guys direct uploading to the website? Or are you, as I was, dragging my files to the Dropbox folder on my computer? I found that speeds increased tremendously when I uploaded to the website and let my computer sync to that. I'm not getting 5 gigabytes but it's faster.

Download speeds aren't anything to mess your pants about either. 5MB/s on 15MB/s connection. Not exactly what you would expect for a paid service. I've also noticed on my laptop that the crypt and compress operations are maxing out a single core, and not even utlizing the other cores. That seems to indicate the crypt and compress operations are single threaded, and when you hit fast enough speeds, that becomes the bottle-neck vs your internet connection.

I am facing the same slow upload speeds, even after changing the Upload Preferences. I tried on my Mac & PC on Chrome & Safari browser. Same results. My desktop sync client no problem. I have more than one DB account. How can i install another account without interfering with the other?

Hi everyone!

As you may know, all of the Dropbox servers are located in the US (and you might live far from those servers).
Moreover, your connection speed to Dropbox depends on the routing you get between your ISP and our servers, and may be slower than your ISP's rated speeds.

Could you try resetting your connection? It might get you a different route and better speeds :) but that is outside of our control :(.
Some ISPs also throttle sustained connections so if you see an initial high connection speed followed by lower speeds, that could be the reason.

You can also configure Dropbox to use all of your network bandwidth, as the default setting includes some throttling in order to keep Dropbox from impeding other network traffic while syncing.

You can read about how to adjust the Dropbox network bandwidth here:

https://help.dropbox.com/syncing-uploads/faster-sync

I hope this helps!

Well sorry Andrea but Dropbox speed sucks... I already said it I know.

Again, I live in Canada, I am tech savvy and work in the telecom industry. I have 175Mbps upload speed and THIS is what I really have and test my speed regularly.

Dropbox speed is NOWHERE near close to half of 0.5% of that, it is brutally slow. So slow I subscribed to Picturelife for my pictures storage and will not be renewing Dropbox when my subscription is over.

Good luck

Andrea--

I wouldn't have posted on this forum if I hadn't already isolated those variables. I don't have time to give you a complete breakdown of my methodology, but one of the many testing methods I utilized was leveraging an EC2 box in the same datacenter as dropbox and it is capable of completing saturating my home connection, even at peak usage hours, and using SSL. In fact, I was able to get better transfer speeds than dropbox by tunneling my connection through amsterdam, and back to the same datacenter as dropbox in the US.

In addition, I experience slow speeds from dropbox with AND without the app, and have verified the app bandwidth settings.

The more likely scenario: In an effort to reduce costs, dropbox is over scheduling and undersizing their EC2 boxes which act as the gateway to the amazon S3 stores where the files are stored. Therefore, any bottleneck that occurs on the EC2 boxes will give rise to a bottleneck on the overall transfer speed. This bottleneck could be in any number of places: CPU on enc-dec operations (undersizing the EC2 box), CPU on misc serving operations (undersizing the EC2 box), individual EC2 instance bandwidth (over scheduling the EC2 box), too many simultaneous connections to an individual S3 store (Over scheduling an S3 store)

While I completely understand WHY dropbox would do this (gotta make money right?), I am disappointed they are doing this. I would gladly pay $5 more a month to get a speed which I would describe as "price of entry" for a cloud storage service.

Just imagine how upset the people with gigabit internet are? You have gigabit internet and you can only access your dropbox files at 60-100 mbps. I would be irate. Thankfully I only have 150 mbps connection, so the insult doesn't sting as much.

You have to realize that when you offer people 1 TB of cloud storage, the speed at which you can access your files becomes paramount.

Hi, people. We were having the same issue on different browsers (Firefox, IE and Chrome). Even with great internet speed, Dropbox would be very slow to upload files. We realized that this was happening to all web browsers on a specific machine, it was not related to hardware, web browser, Dropbox account or internet connection, just the machine itself.

I am talking about a Windows 7 machine here.

A friend of mine sought out over the web solutions and we found out an interesting command that worked out for us, it is:
netsh winsock reset catalog

Open your CMD and type this in. This should reset all of the settings cached in your web browsing, for us this did resolve the issue and the speed with uploads is better now. I hope the same happens for you.

For Mac platform, I am not sure which command should be the one valid.

I have this problem on windows, mac, and Linux. I also have the problem in both the web browser (multiple browsers) and the standalone app. I also have the problem with wget.

I get 7 megs upload speed here, but am uploading to dropbox at 240 kbps. You guys kind of need to sort out this issue before your business falls apart. You can't blame the ISPs or server hops for this because other services like google drive are much much faster. If other companies can figure it out, I'm sure your geniuses are up to task. ;)

Jeff N. pointed out some good issues. Have your guys take a look at your AWS account and see if you can restructure a few things. I can't believe it actually that dropbox is still using Amazon servers. Certainly you'd find that its way better and cheaper in the long run to manage your own servers.

I have a similar problem, but for me it's the desktop app that is extremely slow to upload whereas through the web browser my uploads are quite fast.

We might as well just close this thread. (If such a thing is possible) It is obvious Dropbox doesn't want to answer this question. Frankly I could throw a baseball blindfolded at Dropbox HQ and hit a software engineer in the back of the head that could answer this question in 15 minutes. Its the same reason you wait 10 minutes to check out at Walmart. Not enough resources have been devoted. It is almost certainly a problem of economics. If they deployed enough EC2/S3 resources then things would speed up, but that would cost money. We can only hope that the cost curve for their architecture cheapens faster than the cost curve for end-user internet bandwidth. If it doesn't, we are all in for some great disappointment.

Hi, same problem here - Dropbox app (pro account) on Mac syncs around 100x slower than LAN upload speeds, as measured by www.speedtest.net. I contacted the Dropbox help via chat, and they basically denied that such a problem existed, and said to wait indefinitely. They really should fix this, or at least admit that the problem exists. Very bad for a paid service.

I have just signed up to Pro. I have added a 200GB folder and it is taking forever. Details here: https://www.dropboxforum.com/hc/communities/public/questions/204350765-Dropbox-Pro-sync-upload-is-infuriatingly-slow-even-when-selecting-Don-t-Limit-

6 Months using Dropbox. 4 PC computers from three different locations

4 hours to upload 100M of files. COmputer slows down massively as Dropbox sucks up RAM and other resources.

Takes 30 minutes to index files each time program launched.

Have super-high speed ADSL at all locations.

No other problems for any other PC or internet useage.

Have checked all dropbox technical suggestions (bandwidth at maximum in preferences etc.) to no avail.

Impossible to understand how/why Dropbox can justify charging for a service - ONE SERVICE - that does not work properly.

I mean if Dropbox exists to provide high-speed access and storage to files but a large part of their users cannot use high-speed access... what's the point of their existence?

And where is/are the solutions coming from Tech support for this fundamental, basic isse? Zero.

We have no choice but to find alternatives because for us, this "service" is more a pain than a service/Help.

We have no choice because.... as it stands... dropox simply does not work.

Crazy, but true

It is unfortunate really. I haven't had the problems you have had with RAM/CPU usage, but do I have the bandwidth issue fairly often. 

Almost every test I have run, using different file types, settings, computers, ISPs, operating systems, etc points to a bottle neck on the Dropbox side. Either an artificial software bottleneck or a real hardware one.

Of course, Dropbox would never admit to this. They would never admit that they are either A) purposefully limiting transfer speeds or B) not spending enough on bandwidth/hardware.

They have no choice but to ignore us in some sense. This is why every time someone complains about bandwidth they give you the boiler plate set of steps on how to "solve it" -- and they are steps that are OBVIOUS. (Checking ISP bandwidth, very DB settings, etc)

It also seems quite likely that they can't afford more hardware resources. Unless amazon is giving them an unprecedented discount on S3 storage and EC2 instances, just looking at the cheapest bulk-buy public facing costs of these services -- dropbox can't really make money once your account hits around 250-300 GB. (For the 1TB accounts) Again, not something they are likely to admit to in the near future. I guess our only hope is the hardware costs continue to fall and they find some efficiency gains in their software/algorithms to solve this issue. 

Hi everyone,

We're sorry to hear about those issues with transfer speeds and RAM usage.

Regarding the CPU usage, do you think you could give our forum build a try?

It handles memory really well :)

https://www.dropboxforum.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/204961815-Experimental-Build-3-9-36

Let us know if it helped!

This is a very serious problem that needs to be fixed. Over the past 3 months or so, my Dropbox sync takes forever (say, 20-30 minutes to sync about 100 small files). Slow syncing has also caused a number of other problems. For example, I run a program on a loop that updates a (tiny) file every 5 seconds or so. When dropbox takes longer than 5 seconds to sync this file--which never happened in the past--the program crashes, saying that the file cannot be accessed (it is as if Dropbox has the file open or temporarily write-protected).

I am on the verge of canceling my paid dropbox account and switching to another provider.

P.S. my bandwidth settings are both "no limit"