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First, even if you "installed an application to your dropbox", it would still be running from your local machine - that's just how Dropbox works. Second, even
by tnorthcutt 14y ago
First, even if you "installed an application to your dropbox", it would still be running from your local machine - that's just how Dropbox works.
Second, even if it were running the application from Dropbox's server(s) (it seems like that's what you mean?), it would still have to read from their servers - you can't magically eliminate a bottleneck just by moving it to a different physical computer; data still has to be read from disk.
- gregable 14y agoThough it could be read from several disks simultaneously / cached to flash/RAM and other neat tricks to improve I/O bandwidth.
- randomdata 14y agoThough a big datacenter seems like the perfect place to spread the bits around so that you can read from multiple physical disks/computers simultaneously to improve performance. This is unlike your laptop where you are probably not carrying multi-disk arrays around with you.
- sp332 14y agoHm, could you write a client using the Dropbox API wrapped in, say, a FUSE filesystem driver? Just to use the remote storage directly as a filesystem?
- betterth 14y agoYes, I messed that up, sorry. But it's still an impressive feat and I'm still very excited about getting 1Gbit internet!