Dropbox causes xorg to use 100% CPU

7

2

For some time, I noticed that my xorg process uses up between 60 and 100% of the CPU (according to top). I also noticed that interactive work becomes sluggish, even on my multi-core i7 processor.

After reading several threads on xorg and CPU load, I investigated and found Dropbox to be the culprit. If I disable Dropbox (or just pause the syncing), xorg CPU usage goes down to normal (a few percent).

Any idea what's going on and what can be done about it? It is not like Dropbox is doing anything—there are very few files in the folder and all are perfectly synced already.

I am running Kubuntu 12.10 with X.org 1.13.0 and Dropbox 1.4.0.

sui

Posted 2012-12-13T08:51:04.880

Reputation: 71

The bad thing about faulty closed software is that you have got very few possibilities to debug or improve it. You would find amazing things when strace-ing some programs :) Active waits, redundant repeated file accesses and so on. – Raúl Salinas-Monteagudo – 2014-10-23T12:14:02.830

1Problem should be gone. I use dropbox 3.0.3 and do not experience such issues. – Christian Hujer – 2014-12-31T20:45:51.027

2Last time I looked at the dropbox client for Linux, it was a sorry piece of very badly written code. Would have gotten an F- for my students... – vonbrand – 2013-01-15T18:11:12.050

Answers

0

Now, 2019. Dropbox is on version 79. Using it with Debian on a i7 7th gen, it still consumes ~ 15% Cpu when not uploading or downloading files.

In its download page, Dropbox says how to install in an headless environment.

The dropboxd executable always open tray icon when running on X. I found that runnng it always in headless mode made CPU consuption lower to 1% after few minutes

#!/bin/bash

unset DISPLAY
while : ; do
  rm -rf $HOME/.dropbox/dropbox.pid
  rm -rf /tmp/dropbox*
  ~/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd
  sleep 10
done >> /dev/null

Be aware of run this only after login on Dropbox

Thadeu de Paula

Posted 2012-12-13T08:51:04.880

Reputation: 1

Asked: 2012-12-13T08:51:04.880

Viewed: 863 times

Active: 2019-09-01T05:35:13.990