Cloud storage upload speed - a comparison

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Which is precisely why the OP told us what it was in his original post .

Did I overlook it? My apologies to the OP.
That is a good upload speed or at least middle of the road.

[rebl]

Well it's 50mbps download / 5 or 6 (really don't know and can't test right now) mbps upload.
It's a ADSL or VDSL connection.
I don't think I have problems with the ISP, running speedtest almost always shows the max speed of the contract.
Might be something regarding odrive though - being an alternative client. I'm not sure but maybe dropbox and onedrive are throttling back the upload speed for clients they don't recognize (or for all users).
The comparison clearly shows constant upload speed for box.com and google drive and gaps in upload for onedrive and especially dropbox.
Running various google searches on this topic with different wording I finally found others noticing the same thing ("When Dropbox uploads files, it does not sustain a constant speed. The upload happens in bursts, stopping for a few seconds every few seconds. Other apps, such as CloudApp or Google Drive, or even ftp, upload consistently. This is a traffic graph of Dropbox uploading:":
http://webapps.stackexchange.com/que...load-in-bursts
and the reply from someone was that Dropbox uploads in chunks of 4mb:
https://www.dropbox.com/developers-v1/core/docs

[Cinisajoy]

Hey rebl,
Even on downloads there is not a truly consistent speed. I know this from updating my GPS.
I think with your Dropbox it was just more noticeable.

[rebl]

I finally have put order into the mess
- fiction/literature books go to box.com
- personal docs to main google drive account
- educational books (manuals, courses, piano scores ) go to one google drive account
- dropbox and onedrive - to be filled later with backup fiction collection

odrive client is kinda nice, but messes up gdocx and gsheex files on google docs (which I do know they are not "real" documents but a kind of links to the "real" documents... I have no idea where are those, fact is that moving around gdocx and gsheets files using odrive has made a few of them inoperable)

[Purple Lady]

Dropbox has always been fast for me. What are your bandwidth settings in Dropbox? I looked thru my ebooks and the largest I could find was 65 MB. I placed a copy in the root of my Dropbox folder and it was uploaded in 2 or 3 seconds. I do have good service though - I think it's 150 down and 15 up.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Purple Lady

Dropbox has always been fast for me. What are your bandwidth settings in Dropbox? I looked thru my ebooks and the largest I could find was 65 MB. I placed a copy in the root of my Dropbox folder and it was uploaded in 2 or 3 seconds. I do have good service though - I think it's 150 down and 15 up.

15MBit/sec is about 1.9MBytes/sec, so the very fastest that a 65MB file could upload is about 35s .

[Purple Lady]

Originally Posted by HarryT

15MBit/sec is about 1.9MBytes/sec, so the very fastest that a 65MB file could upload is about 35s .

I didn't think it sounded correct. But the time it took from when I pasted the file into the Dropbox folder and the notification popped up was only a few seconds. I pasted the file and was going to the Dropbox icon in the system tray to see what the download rate was. By the time the cursor got there it popped up saying that sync was completed or it was up to date or whatever the message is. Dropbox must put the message up when it's on the last file then or something.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by Purple Lady

I didn't think it sounded correct. But the time it took from when I pasted the file into the Dropbox folder and the notification popped up was only a few seconds. I pasted the file and was going to the Dropbox icon in the system tray to see what the download rate was. By the time the cursor got there it popped up saying that sync was completed or it was up to date or whatever the message is. Dropbox must put the message up when it's on the last file then or something.

Maybe it just reads the files to be synced into memory, and then tells you that syncing is completed, while in the background it is still transferring.

Windows does the same thing if you copy a file to a USB-stick or external hard drive, especially if it's a bunch of smaller files. Writing smaller files is slow. They are transferred into a buffer, waiting to be written. When you don't use the computer for a few seconds, the OS starts writing the files.

This is the reason why you always have to use "safely remove hardware". If you just disconnect the drive, files you copied to it minutes ago may actually still not be written.

[Sweetpea]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

No, I'm indeed talking about upload speeds.

I had a 1Mbit upload before I switched to cable, so 5Mbit is absolutely not the slowest that exists...

I was talking about this:

Originally Posted by Katsunami

5 MBit is about the slowest you can still get over here, except if you live on a farm on dial-up. So.. IMHO, 5.3 MBit/s is on the slow side of things

And I do live in the same country as you and I did not have dial up. And I did have 4Mbit down and 1Mbit up. (And I didn't know Ziggo would raise the speed again in April?)

Originally Posted by Katsunami

By the way: ADSL, does that still exist? I thought it had been replaced by ADSL2(+) and/or VDSL/VDSL2 a long time ago.

I have no idea if I had ADSL or ADSL2 (plus it was absolutely not!), I just call it ADSL. But it doesn't matter if it's ADSL or ADSL2 if your distance to the connection point is too far. You still get a slow connection...

[Dopedangel]

Originally Posted by Purple Lady

I didn't think it sounded correct. But the time it took from when I pasted the file into the Dropbox folder and the notification popped up was only a few seconds. I pasted the file and was going to the Dropbox icon in the system tray to see what the download rate was. By the time the cursor got there it popped up saying that sync was completed or it was up to date or whatever the message is. Dropbox must put the message up when it's on the last file then or something.

If you already have the same file in your Dropbox it will not upload it again will check the checksum and copy it over.
Rumors were going around a few years ago that if someone else has also the exact same file in dropbox it will copy that file instead of uploading from your computer but I am not sure if that's true or not.

[Purple Lady]

Originally Posted by Dopedangel

If you already have the same file in your Dropbox it will not upload it again will check the checksum and copy it over.
Rumors were going around a few years ago that if someone else has also the exact same file in dropbox it will copy that file instead of uploading from your computer but I am not sure if that's true or not.

I keep a backup of my Calibre library in Dropbox, so this may be why it was so quick. Thanks!

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by Sweetpea

I had a 1Mbit upload before I switched to cable, so 5Mbit is absolutely not the slowest that exists...

Sorry, I should have been more clear. "Over here" I mean at my location

(And I didn't know Ziggo would raise the speed again in April?)

See here, only for one subscription though (the middle one).

[Sweetpea]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Sorry, I should have been more clear. "Over here" I mean at my location



See here, only for one subscription though (the middle one).

I must have missed that one... So, within the 15 months or so since I have a ziggo subscription, I'll go from 90/9 to 150/15. So, in a year and half we'll have 200/20?

Back to the topic on hand!

One thing I do notice between the two services I use, is that DropBox handles a lot of small changes better than OneDrive.