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[perkiset]

Dropbox Safety Tip

Intermittently for the last couple days, but then finally full time today, my home network has been really slow. I mean really slow. Like, latencies that hover in the 31ms zone normally were up in the 1500 ms zone. Rebooted everything, rewired stuff, it'd be OK for a bit and then get bad again.

Finally got it down to PinkHat's machine. DropBox' default upload limit is "Limit Automatically" which tries to calculate about 75% of your upload capability and stay under that. Although haven't read anything specific, I believe it samples the line regularly and adjusts itself dynamically ... this is what would make sense for it to use the line much harder when you're dark in the middle of the night - as well as backing way off if you're working your network hard so that there's no (or very little) noticeable difference in network capability.

Anyhoo, dropbox apparently decided that my entire upload capability was its own. It was completely saturating my upload side, which of course affected the download side as well. Rebooting did NOT FIX IT. What I did was click "No Limit" under the preferences, then "Limit Automatically" a couple times and it sorted itself out. I also noticed that if you set it to limit itself automatically while the machine is unplugged, it seems to set itself to 5K/second, which is incredibly slow and it didn't seem to sample/recalculate. That was a weird one.

So having the computer up and doing normal activities, then cycling through the limitation options seemed to sort it out.