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Comment by QuadrupleA | Hacker News Reader

All this talk of efficiency, yet the Dropbox windows client is such a bloated multi-process memory hog of a mess that I ended up uninstalling it and rigging my own sync with a command line tool (dbxcli), with about 1000x less resource usage.

For all this attention to saving their server's resources they sure don't seem to care much about wasting their customers'.

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This is classic.

"We spent $x million developing a compression algorithm in Rust to slightly speed up a background process in our bloated Electron app!"

The Electron app wouldn't be an issue if it didn't churn away uselessly even when Dropbox is in the background. The company doesn't care though, their advice was to open a topic in the support forum, to which their response is "This idea will need some more support before we can share it with the team." You can lead a horse to water.

I had a paid subscription but canceled because of their attitude on this. When dropbox.exe can't sync a file because of some file permission or other access problem, it just consumes huge amounts of CPU trying over and over. There is no notification of a problem. There is no log. There is no place in the interface where you can look to see what file is causing the problem or even that there is a problem. You have to just notice the CPU usage.

When I told the support person that this was a problem, he flat out refused to open a ticket or file a bug report. He denied that this was a problem!

That was a couple of years ago, so maybe they have improved since then, but I'll never find out.

With so many Rust engineers, they could get rid of all that Electron bloat with the Rust-based electron alternative, Tauri.

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