I have an external HDD which I wanted to utilize as Dropbox backup. It's connected to a secondary idle PC via USB. I've installed Dropbox and set its location at the external drive hoping it would download everything I have in the cloud.
Dropbox app has been running for over a day and it seems to have generated whole directory structure (~400 000 folders), but almost no data was downloaded yet.
I'm checking it in Windows Resource Monitor and it appears to use almost no network, it's going merely up to 1-5 kB/s Send speed and 500 B/s Receive speed. Normally this PC has no problem to download files with 10 MB/s, so there is no issue with my connection.
Dropbox process is certainly not idle, it's working its tail off, using 40% of CPU and over 1 GB of RAM.
On Disk tab it shows that Dropbox process is mostly writing to:
- NTFS Volume Log
- NTFS Master File Table
- nucleus.sqlite3-wal
- Dropbox logs
- sync_history.db-journal
- .dropbox.cache\new_files
None of those are saved with speed greater than 0.3 MB/s. The actual files in my Dropbox folder are being saved with 300 B/s. This external drive is no speed demon, but surely it can handle 20 MB/s easily.
I don't recall having this problem when I had Dropbox location on internal drive, on the same PC. So we can rule out PC/system fault too.
What's causing this sluggish speed then? I have a total of around 1 TB to download, with this pace it's going to take a year.
11 Answer
Small update, as synchronization gained momentum after 5-6 days.
My take on this issue:
- It's not the volume of data that was the problem, it's the amount of files - many sources confirm that Dropbox performance plummets above 300k files. Zipping folders with big amount of files might help.
- Turning off real-time virus protection helps too (scanning downloaded files was slowing it down).
- Dropbox downloads smallest files first, so that's why it felt like it's stuck.
- For most time it had consistent speed of 15 000 files per hour.
- Once it's done with smaller files it starts making use of full network bandwidth to download larger files.
