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jeanzbeanz's avatar
jeanzbeanz
Helpful | Level 5
8 years ago

Dropbox not uploading/ uploading v slow

I have dropbox installed on multiple devices and they all work fine, except it has suddenly stopped uploading on my windows laptop. I moved a load of photos off my phone onto dropbox on my laptop l...
Desktop
Sync
upload
Windows
  • Jane's avatar
    Jane
    8 years ago
    Hey walwar, 
     
    Let me send over some more details and tips to determine the cause!
     
    • For starters, you may have a look here for some steps to adjust your bandwidth locally. 
    • Secondly, you could try force quitting all other applications and see if this helps improving your syncing speed. 
    • Also, let me ask you whether you’re in a work or home environment. 
    • You could use the link below to check your connection speed through your ISP and local network by using the following link: http://www.speedtest.net/
     
    I’ll be following-up here, so please keep me updated in your reply! 
Douglas S.'s avatar
Douglas S.
New member | Level 1

I have a 5MB upload hard wired internet. Yet when I upload large files using my desktop application, I'm only getting 10-66kb transfer speeds. Why so slow? My ISP has checked and found nothing wrong with my service. Is Dropbox "throttling back" my upload speed? There are no other devises being used that would reduce band width. Please help!

Jeff N.3's avatar
Jeff N.3
Helpful | Level 5
10 years ago

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.

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