[kovidgoyal]

@chaley: Is restarting the server via monit really necessary? IIRC, any endpoint in the server uses check_if_modified() which checks the modified timestamp on metadata.db and if it is modified, it automatically closes and re-opens the connection to metadata.db

Since the check uses mtimes on the metadata.db path, it should not matter what technique the sync service uses to update the file.

EDIT: Although I have to say that if dropbox is doing a delete and then create, which is not atomic, as opposed to copy-sync-rename, which is, then re-opening the database connection with a partially synced metadata.db would cause bad things to happen.