Another take at Dropbox vs Syncthing

General
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I have been logging some system information on my laptop over last month and I wanted to share how Syncthing and Dropbox compare in terms of memory usage. The plot below shows that syncthing is very stable as compared to dropbox. The later seems to have some sort of memory leak - linearly increasing memory usage.

GhaasPhoos_mem_usage_syncing.png1300Ă—275 69.6 KB

Some more detailed info:

  • syncthing was handling 4414 items, ~6.52 GiB
  • Dropbox was handling 7711 items, ~3.8 GB (~3.6 GiB)
  • x-axis (time) is quite discontinuous, as the laptop is not always on/awake. Bold vertical lines with labels mark starting of the day.
  • Sharp decline on the dropbox memory usage (eg: around 07/1 and 07/8) are the occasions when laptop was restarted (other times I just put laptop to sleep).
  • Data was sampled every 15 minutes on a Linux OS.
  • Caja is a file-explorer software on Mate desktop environment, just happen to be also logged (no relation to this post).

I have been using syncthing since ~mid 2014 (switched from Btsync) and I am a very satisfied with it. Great job with all the updates! Hope that syncthing keep getting better.

3 Likes
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To add, the file syncing “activity” on dropbox was definitely much lower (more than 20x) than that on syncthing in this duration. dropbox was basically sitting idle with few file changes each day, while syncthing was syncing my 4-5 devices including my phone’s camera, download and whatsapp folder.

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I somehow think it would look the opposite on the CPU usage spectrum.