It will gradually pick up in a few minutes. I've had that before too.
Not sure why sometimes it starts up slowly.
It takes a lot longer than a few minutes for it to speed up. Sometimes I come back the next morning and it's still running in the 2K-5K per second range.
I thought it was peer-to-peer, I don't think they're even keeping copies of the data.
BTW, I'm running the 0.8 version, it's supposedly faster, but so far -- doesn't seem to be.
I don't think they're using peer to peer. From what I know they use local syncing on the client and the content is uploaded via SSL, and stored encrypted on EC2 storage.
Thanks -- a friend and I were discussing that the other day. I wasn't sure, he thought for sure it was P2P.
It is peer 2 peer within the lan ( see options - enable lan syncing ). This is great for companies that manage shares though dropbox. This way you don't have 40 people download the same bit.
You don't need a camera to take a screenshot.
Thanks. Usually true, but in this case, I did.
Usually when this happens to me, I close Dropbox (quit the application), wait a few minutes, then re-open it. Typically that fixes the slow speed and ramps it back up to capacity (I'm on Verizon Fios).
Ceph or AFS may be worth a look-see
While Ceph is a cool project (in my heavily biased opinion), it's in a completely different realm from Dropbox.