4 ms·

I think too few people know about this sort of problem or care about it. Dropbox is another example of a well-known CPU hog: on a Mac, it still insists of watch

by jwr 10y ago

I think too few people know about this sort of problem or care about it. Dropbox is another example of a well-known CPU hog: on a Mac, it still insists of watching and processing all filesystem changes, not just those inside the Dropbox subtree, so any file operation you perform anywhere on the computer has a Dropbox tax. You pay with your battery life. And yet, after so many years, this is not enough of an annoyance for them to work on it.

JustSomeNobody 10y ago
I don't let dropbox run in the background. I don't need it all the time, so i don't let it run all the time. I really wish they'd fix their junk. As a developer, I hate that we're becoming a bunch of "whatever"s. I mean this is junk behavior.
- wkd 10y ago
  Completely agree, for example chrome has been observed flushing full state data to disk at regular intervals even with no changes since 2010[1] which is eating battery and SSD lifetime. Firefox does this too as far as I know. Not to mention the battery impact of poorly written javascript SPA's or advertisements. [1]: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=52663 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=52663
  - yoklov 10y ago
    It's hard to know what the right call is here. In most cases the battery life hit seems to be fairly minimal (I've never noticed it in any browser, even back when I used chrome), and preventing data loss is, well, fairly important -- at least it can be depending on the site. OTOH there are almost certainly sites that trigger very bad behavior here. While I've never dug into it too much, it wouldn't surprise me that session store was part of why e.g. IRCCloud or Slack have such high power usage (although I don't know for certain -- it could just as easily be something else). My understanding is that SSD lifetimes concerns are largely misplaced (or at the very least, only relevant for a fairly small subset of users) and that even reasonably old SSDs can handle well into petabytes of writes -- which is far above what this behavior can reasonably approach. But power usage concerns are totally legitimate IMO. Full disclosure: I'm not unbiased here, I work on Firefox (but have never touched session store).
nerdponx 10y ago
Is there any reason to trust that Dropbox isn't phoning home with full knowledge of how you use your computer?
gumby 10y ago
This is especially absurd because Apple provides an API (fsevents) specifically designed to let you subscribe to the filesystem changes you care about. But the lump of python dropbox ships as their "application" doesn't know about it. And instead of putting two engineers on fixing this they also try to "add value" by hijacking the accessibility support of your computer. Fortunately Apple catches this, warns you, and lets you say no. Despite all this: I have tried Box, Onedrive, iCloud Drive, and Google Drive and still, Dropbox sucks the least in terms of naive user compatibility and fewest surprises. I don't know why this is so hard to get right!?

by jwr 10y ago

JustSomeNobody 10y ago

I don't let dropbox run in the background. I don't need it all the time, so i don't let it run all the time. I really wish they'd fix their junk. As a developer, I hate that we're becoming a bunch of "whatever"s. I mean this is junk behavior.

wkd 10y ago
Completely agree, for example chrome has been observed flushing full state data to disk at regular intervals even with no changes since 2010[1] which is eating battery and SSD lifetime. Firefox does this too as far as I know. Not to mention the battery impact of poorly written javascript SPA's or advertisements. [1]: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=52663 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=52663
- yoklov 10y ago
  It's hard to know what the right call is here. In most cases the battery life hit seems to be fairly minimal (I've never noticed it in any browser, even back when I used chrome), and preventing data loss is, well, fairly important -- at least it can be depending on the site. OTOH there are almost certainly sites that trigger very bad behavior here. While I've never dug into it too much, it wouldn't surprise me that session store was part of why e.g. IRCCloud or Slack have such high power usage (although I don't know for certain -- it could just as easily be something else). My understanding is that SSD lifetimes concerns are largely misplaced (or at the very least, only relevant for a fairly small subset of users) and that even reasonably old SSDs can handle well into petabytes of writes -- which is far above what this behavior can reasonably approach. But power usage concerns are totally legitimate IMO. Full disclosure: I'm not unbiased here, I work on Firefox (but have never touched session store).

nerdponx 10y ago

Is there any reason to trust that Dropbox isn't phoning home with full knowledge of how you use your computer?

gumby 10y ago

This is especially absurd because Apple provides an API (fsevents) specifically designed to let you subscribe to the filesystem changes you care about. But the lump of python dropbox ships as their "application" doesn't know about it. And instead of putting two engineers on fixing this they also try to "add value" by hijacking the accessibility support of your computer. Fortunately Apple catches this, warns you, and lets you say no. Despite all this: I have tried Box, Onedrive, iCloud Drive, and Google Drive and still, Dropbox sucks the least in terms of naive user compatibility and fewest surprises. I don't know why this is so hard to get right!?