Dropbox dropped Prime95 performance 47%
 

Hello,

I'm mired in a huge project, but I had to take this break because the impact seems to be so significant.

A business colleague involved in the project suggested that I register for Dropbox as a way to share, over the Internet, the very large files that we work with. I'd been curious about Dropbox for a while, so this pushed me over the edge and I decided to try it.

Big mistake! When I downloaded and installed the Dropbox software, my screen went completely black for some seconds. Finally it came back, but the first thing I noticed was that the green Prime95 icon in the Notification Area had turned red!?! I clicked on it, and the program appeared to be continuing to run normally. So I proceeded to retrieve the file I needed through Dropbox, and went merrily (if a little rattled) on my way.

The next time I checked the Prime95 icon for performance, I noticed that the "Per iteration time" for my LL work had jumped from an average of 0.098 seconds to 0.144 seconds -- 47 percent slower!

Rebooting the system did not improve things -- performance was still severely affected. The Dropbox software seems to be constantly monitoring for file changes or something. But all I wanted was literally a "drop" box that I would fill when [B][U]I[/U][/B] chose to, not something that's continuously draining CPU cycles. :mad:

Now, I don't like it when software does weird and unexpected things to my computer, and the effect on Prime95 was the final straw. I uninstalled, removed, and obliterated Dropbox from my computer. Now Prime95 is back to where it was before this mistake, and we're back to using e-mail attachments.

I learned later that it's not necessary to actually install the Dropbox software in order to get files from other people, but I was not clear on this based on the installation screens. Not good -- I prefer forthright and unambiguous explanations of the choices I'm being offered.

Have others experienced a Prime95 performance hit after installing Dropbox?

Rodrigo

Not from DropBox but certain Facebook applications especially Bejeweled Blitz (even when idle) can use most of 1 core of my quad.

Opera Unite might be better for your application...but I have no direct experience with it.

[QUOTE=petrw1;263802]Not from DropBox but certain Facebook applications especially Bejeweled Blitz (even when idle) can use most of 1 core of my quad.[/QUOTE]

not surprising half the time I'm surprised Facebook can even load period.

There are several alternatives I can suggest.

1) Get some web hosting and FTP the files you want to share to it, most hosting comes with a free domain. The files will then be accessible via http:// from anywhere in the world, and you password protect them from the rest of the world with a simple .htaccess file.

2) Setup a virtual private network, this can be done very easily by downloading Hamachi (for Windows). Then you can share a folder on your PC for a given username/password that you give to your colleague, and he would do the same. You can also choose to deny access to any other folder shares you may have to the username you give him, this is easy to do in Computer Management for Windows, and I suspect even easier on Linux. When you want to send your colleague something, simply copy it to his shared folder. This does require you both leaving your systems on though.

3) Sneakernet! If the files are extremely large, you could be better off swapping encrypted DVDs or even HDDs. In particular DVDs are easy and cheap to post.

Of these three, honestly the first sounds the easiest and best solution, but it depends what your particular needs are. As a mini case study, I have some webhosting and do semi-frequently throw up multi-gigabyte files over FTP to it, they don't seem to mind at all, it's just a drop in the bucket to them. If you like the hosting idea, I have some ridiculous discount promo codes for my host.

[QUOTE=lavalamp;263813]There are several alternatives I can suggest.

1) Get some web hosting and FTP the files you want to share to it, most hosting comes with a free domain. The files will then be accessible via http:// from anywhere in the world, and you password protect them from the rest of the world with a simple .htaccess file.

2) Setup a virtual private network, this can be done very easily by downloading Hamachi (for Windows). Then you can share a folder on your PC for a given username/password that you give to your colleague, and he would do the same. You can also choose to deny access to any other folder shares you may have to the username you give him, this is easy to do in Computer Management for Windows, and I suspect even easier on Linux. When you want to send your colleague something, simply copy it to his shared folder. This does require you both leaving your systems on though.

3) Sneakernet! If the files are extremely large, you could be better off swapping encrypted DVDs or even HDDs. In particular DVDs are easy and cheap to post.

Of these three, honestly the first sounds the easiest and best solution, but it depends what your particular needs are. As a mini case study, I have some webhosting and do semi-frequently throw up multi-gigabyte files over FTP to it, they don't seem to mind at all, it's just a drop in the bucket to them. If you like the hosting idea, I have some ridiculous discount promo codes for my host.[/QUOTE]

Very interesting ideas, lavalamp -- thanks!

I, too, like especially the idea of a dedicated website. I'll run it by my customer (this project is part of an ongoing concern) and see if he's willing to cover the expense. :wink: Might be interesting to learn about hosting a website, too.

The main purpose of reporting this performance hit, though, was to give a heads-up to anyone in GIMPS who was thinking about using Dropbox (or, I imagine, some other service like it). Now it sounds like Facebook and maybe others have comparable adverse effects.

Rodrigo

P.S. Hey, I hit 300 posts!

[QUOTE=Rodrigo;263817]I, too, like especially the idea of a dedicated website. I'll run it by my customer (this project is part of an ongoing concern) and see if he's willing to cover the expense. :wink: Might be interesting to learn about hosting a website, too.[/QUOTE]Be careful throwing around that word dedicated. There are three main types of hosting; shared, VPS, and dedicated. Dedicated means you get the whole server, and it can be quite expensive. I'd recommend only looking into shared hosting at first, it's much cheaper and is quite ample for a website with even quite a lot of traffic, if indeed you plan to put a website on the space.

[QUOTE=Rodrigo;263817]Now it sounds like Facebook and maybe others have comparable adverse effects.[/QUOTE]Generally speaking, anything flash heavy will eat CPU. Similarly, anything JavsScript heavy will.

So a website that loads up with Flashy JavaScripty ads is a CPU killer. It's pretty easy to lose a CPU core to Flash, and if you open lots of tabs, JavaScript can eat up another. If you use a browser like Chrome where each tab runs a separate thread, then JavaScript can actually eat up several cores worth if you open enough tabs.

Flash seems to be particularly bad, it's like Adobe haven't made any attempt at all to optimise it. Flash video is a prime example, on lower end PCs video played by Flash will stutter along, but when the same video is played by a media player it will run just fine.

JavaScript interpreters are actually highly optimised, with the broswers all competing against each other for the best performance. Unfortunately a lot of the people that write code in JavaScript couldn't give two hoots about performance, and generally it's used for a lot for banner adverts on websites.

Another type of performance suck is sites that are AJAX heavy, constantly requesting and downloading and outputting content to the web page. Anything that could be described as "Web 2.0" fits into this category, and anything that specifically describes itself as "Web 2.0" counts double.

[QUOTE=lavalamp;263813]There are several alternatives I can suggest.

3) Sneakernet! If the files are extremely large, you could be better off swapping encrypted DVDs or even HDDs. In particular DVDs are easy and cheap to post.[/QUOTE]Latency is lousy but the bandwidth is superb. I've exchanged many gigabytes of NFS data by sneakernet over the years.

Paul

[QUOTE=xilman;263828]Latency is lousy but the bandwidth is superb. I've exchanged many gigabytes of NFS data by sneakernet over the years.[/QUOTE]The South Pole uses a C-130 variant of sneakernet as their main data path.

[QUOTE=lavalamp;263813]most hosting comes with a free domain.[/QUOTE]

Beware of that. Some hosts register the domain in their own name, not yours, and don't let you take it with you when you decide to move to a different provider.

Hmm...I've used Dropbox alongside prime-crunching applications (including Prime95 at times) for nearly a year now with no adverse effects. This is on Windows XP SP2; my computer has been running continuously for the last couple of weeks, with Dropbox running the whole time, and it has racked up only ~3.5 minutes of total CPU time according to Task Manager. :huh:

That said, there does definitely appear to be a correlation between Dropbox and Prime95 slowdown on Rodrigo's machine. Rodrigo, just to verify: what kind of Dropbox settings were you using? Was the Dropbox folder in the typical location under My Documents (or under your username directory on Vista/7), or perhaps on an external or network drive? I'm using Dropbox version 1.1.35, and as mentioned before this is on XP SP2 (32-bit). I also have it installed on another machine (Windows 7 64-bit) and have seen no adverse effects there either.