Dropbox: This app is causing your device to run slowly

[David Rosen]

So the other day I got a notification from my phone:

"This app is causing your device to run slowly. To improve your device's performance, tap SAVE POWER to stop this app opening automatically.
Dropbox
10 errors occurred in 1 week."

Really? Dropbox? I kind of have to have Dropbox running, so what gives. Is this a mistake? Could there be something wrong with the app? Should I choose the Save Power option on it? Will it continue to run properly if I do?

Any ideas?

Thanks

 

[B. Diddy]

Is that a stock Samsung app that is reporting this? Or do you have any 3rd party battery saver or "RAM booster" apps installed? The lines are getting blurred recently, since Cheetah Mobile's CleanMaster seems to be showing up preinstalled in more and more devices in some form.

The app could be assuming that Dropbox is slowing your system down because the system opens it frequently, or prefers to keep it open in RAM (which would be normal for an app like Dropbox, since it probably has to check relatively frequently if it needs to sync). The problem with many of these RAM booster/manager apps is that they just assume that apps open in RAM are a bad thing and are "slowing things down." Have you actually noticed decreased performance? And can you get more details on these 10 errors?

 

[David Rosen]

No that message was just from some stock Samsung thing. I had taken a screen cap of the notification when it happened, and it wasn't directing me to any 3rd party app, just into regular system settings. As for performance issues, not really. I did have a little slow down the other day, but a reboot seems to have fixed it.

As for the errors, I wish I had looked at them at the time, because I think it did offer to show me them, but now I don't have any way of bringing it back up.

 

[chanchan05]

It could have been running more than usual. I'm not having that error. However if there are errors in Dropbox itself, it'd be causing a restart cycle. How about a reinstall of Dropbox?

 

[B. Diddy]

Or perhaps clearing the app cache for DropBox.

 

[David Rosen]

Yea I mean it's possible but you always hear about "rogue apps" killing performance and battery, but how could something as essential as Dropbox be one of them, you know what I mean? I could reinstall and clear the cache, and probably will to be safe, but since I wasn't really noticing any problems from it, I'm not sure it's necessary... I'll still proably do it just to be safe... It's still weird that the message came up in the first place though.

 

[B. Diddy]

Perhaps one of your files that gets synced to Dropbox is corrupt, and Dropbox is having difficulty trying to sync it? That might increase its overall CPU usage (kind of like a corrupt file on an SD card increasing CPU usage because the Media Scanner gets stuck on it). Just speculating here.