Hi Avast team and community,
in the last week I have noticed that Dropbox uploads (especially from the Dropbox Desktop App) are immensely slow or not working while my internet connection upload speed seems to be fine. (Dropbox downloads are instantaneous as always.)
Symptoms: I drag something into my dropbox folder, for example a 15 MB picture, and it appears to start synching. The Dropbox application reports ridiculous upload speeds of several thousand kB per second, but nothing gets uploaded - the synch just hangs there (I checked the clock - way more than half an hour, then I gave up). Sometimes something gets uploaded after a long while, but most of the time, it just appears to hang indefinitely.
I suspected Avast and played around with it a little bit - if I close Dropbox, then disable Avast’s Web Shield, then start Dropbox again, file uploading works as expected (15 MB take about a minute). Once I restart Web Shield, the uploading hangs again.
My system is Windows 7 x64, I’m running the newest Dropbox version (2.6.2) after completely uninstalling and reinstalling it. My Avast version is 2014.9.0.2011.
I found postings in the Dropbox forum where several people report problems that sound suspiciously like mine: https://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=109525&replies=28#post-584274 and, more importantly, https://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=109264 .
The suggested workarounds in the second link of adding the Dropbox folder paths to “status”->“antivirus”->“exclusions”->“directories” do not seem to work for me. Closing Dropbox, disabling Web Shield, restarting Dropbox always does the trick. However, I’m not too fond of the idea to disable Web Shield all the time.
Please tell me a (useful) workaround or try to fix this! It makes Dropbox completely unusable for me!
(I’m sorry if this was already reported, but I didn’t find anything when I looked and searched!)
Yours
Anne