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Comment by jwr | Hacker News Reader

Will the use the funds raised to finally optimize their CPU-hungry client, so that it doesn't cut my battery life by 30%?

I'm worried about Dropbox. Worried that they concentrate on adding features (photo syncing?) instead of caring about their loyal paying business customers, who mostly want the software to Just Work and Work Well.

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The dropbox client only uses a fraction of the CPU of every other cloud syncing client I've tried, and even most simple menubar utilities. Do you know of one that uses less CPU? I'm genuinely curious.

It didn't need those amounts of resources when Dropbox first started... What changed? Now it's literally causing Windows Explorer to be stuck on folder renames etc, I'm dying to get off the bandwagon the first opportunity I get. This isn't a good way to compete in a crowded market - hope the competition is just as bad.

BitTorrent Sync is more lightweight.

Really? With both sitting idle on Mavericks right now, BitTorrent Sync is using 1.4% of CPU, Dropbox 0.1. Energy Impact 4.1, and 0.1 respectively. And BTSync is managing 5MB with no more than 3 peers, while Dropbox is keeping eyes over 36GB. That's pretty consistent with what I've always seen from them. Maybe the windows client is better optimized?

I wish this wasn't the case because I would love to switch to something free and distributed, as it is I disable BTSync unless I'm plugged in.

While CPU and battery improvements are always nice, I personally love the added features such as photo syncing. I take a photo on my phone anywhere and it automatically uploads it to my Dropbox in the background so I can view them on my computer when I get home. It's probably one of my favorite features of Dropbox and I hope to see more of this kind of thing in the future. Not to say that other aspects don't need improvement, but I think features like this add a lot of value to the product.

Yeah. I'm having Dropbox disabled on my laptop by default because of how much CPU it'd randomly need evey single file change.

Yes. Dropbox can easily win against SkyDrive, Google Drive, Box, and others by just not screwing up their solution and making it more robust.

Each time I see Dropbox sick page or I have to delete my "~/.dropbox", I think about how focus and doing things right is so important when it comes to storage / data.

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