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In the Event Manager, every second it shows " Failed to connect to the driver". What is this?

Hi,

In Event Manager, every second it shows " Failed to connect to the driver: -2147024894, retrying in 1000 milliseconds¨ ID:320 (DbxSvc).

Is there an update error or something else? Thank you!

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Ross_S

Hi all,

First: Many apologies for the delay in jumping in here, I wanted to make sure I had a concrete update for you all.

So, for context: What is Dbxsvc? :

I've added a section to the help center article: https://www.dropbox.com/help/business/smart-sync (I say section, it's more of a note at the bottom under the driver FAQ).

The file dbxsvc.exe is a file that we use to install the Smart Sync driver. Should you not be a business user, or not have Smart Sync, then this file will never start operating. It is, however, created at install for all users so if you are not a Smart Sync this file will still appear there.

I see we have a number of pretty interesting, creative suggestions on how to disable, coupled with queries if it's safe to disable it. I'm of course not going to endorse a process that disables part of our software, should a feature or functionality cause user pain then we would want to know. Fixability and timeframes can vary depending on the in-depth technical nature of the problem.

Should you decide to disable it with one of the solutions here, it will prevent the smart sync feature from working in some cases. We need the service to update the driver, as well as to establish new driver<->client connections. This is the services current functionality. Additional functionality could be added over time. My main concern around anyone disabling it is that in the future you may need this process, Smart Sync won't work correctly, you can reach out to support but this custom change you've made will be hard for us to diagnose as the root cause of whatever issue you experience.

Why is it failing to connect / what's going wrong?:

It should be failing to connect. This is by design, the actual issue you’re facing is due to the frequency we're writing to the logs. To address any concerns around error with the application, these errors are in no way indicative of a software issue and do not point to any issues with backing up you data. Because it fails to connect, Windows treats this as a trigger to write to the log. Your data is safe, this process is just used to install a driver. As covered in the above section we expect it to do what you are seeing.

With that in mind, we understand that some of you do wish to see this behaviour.

Why aren't we fixing this?:

We are, we take our user feedback very seriously and we have spent many hours working on this. As fixes have many dependencies, and are just one components of a version release, I'm always reluctant to jump onto a thread and give a firm release date for a fix as these are regularly subject to change.

You may have noticed that we took the original connection attempt frequency down from every 1 second to every minute. This was an improvement we took onboard based on the feedback you've supplied here and also via other channels. Our new release, 31.3.15, has further improved this, the process will run 3 times daily. This should reduce the errors written to the logs and not clutter the report.

The new beta version is the first to include a fix:

https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Desktop-client-builds/Beta-Build-31-3-15/m-p/231950#M4152

All comments

philc43

Yes, I too have literally thousands of these entries swamping Event viewer.

safix01

I've found something to resolve this problem but only up to restart

http://windowssecrets.com/forums/showthread.php/178422-Event-Viewer-ID-320?p=1072991&viewfull=1#post1072991

larrymcg

Well, I think your suggestion fixes the symptoms but does nothing to solve the underlying problem.
Hopefully the DropBox people will fix the underlying problem soon. It is good to have the once-a-second event messages stopped though!
-- Larry

Joe C.13

I noticed my computer was lagging very bad. So after a little bit I checked out computer management > windows logs > application.

In there I see the dropbox "dbxSvc" service creating multiple error logs per second. All giving the below error. As soon as I shut down the service, my computer is no longer laggy. Does anyone know why this is happening? I had this error a couple weeks back when I was on the beta, and have since switched to stable and still get the error.

"Failed to connect to the driver: -2147024894, retrying in 1000 milliseconds"

whatnot2

It's appalling that this issue hasn't been resolved yet in the release build. I work in software development - and I would fire the dev who originally wrote this code.

safix01

It's really terrible. No developer has reacted yet. The problem still persists ... I don't know exactly where should I find the latest version ? I have version 29.4.20...:(

Techsys

Every second in the Application Log on Windows 10, I see:

----------

Source: Dbxsvc

Event ID: 320

Failed to connect to the driver: -2147024894, retrying in 1000 milliseconds

----------

I see a reference to this SAME error from a Windows 7 user (from who knows how long ago) and it STILL isn't fixed. Really?! This is ridiculous.

Apparently, filling up the Application Log is of no concern to Dropbox so I guess I'll uninstall it and go without the desktop app.

I'll also instruct my people to remove it from all clients in the Houston area because the desktop app is broken. I can't have everyone's logs filling up with nonsense. They'll just have to use the web interface.

Starkad

I am also getting this error on 5 different machines now. It's been ongoing for weeks. Can this *PLEASE* be looked in to, Dropbox? It is severely impacting machine performance for me.

delmain

This is affecting me as well. I'm trying to diagnose a different issue that involves waiting for intermittent issues and reviewing the event log and since it's just filled with DbxSvc entries, this is proving difficult.

Can we please at least get an update that y'all know what's going on and are trying to fix it?

I see bn replied in the other thread about this issue (the one that was originally about it being an Error instead of Info and was necro'd for this issue), but this is definitely a new thing and needs some looking into.

safix01

Yes, if you don't stop this bug in the command line, you do not have a chance in the event manager to find what you need. It looks like a failed "while cycle" . I don't understand that nobody said anything about it?!

whatnot2

If you log into your DropBox account, go to settings and then tick the box for "Include me on early releases", then you can update your dropbox client to version 30.3.17, which only writes to the event log ever 30 mins..

safix01

that's not much better solution

but thank you. Why that's not still resolved?

delmain

Here's the thing... why is it being logged regularly into the Event Log anyway?

It's not something that's very likely to change over time, seemingly, so why is it not just logged once on service startup and then not looked at again until then?

swinster

I have to say the same thing is occuring here. We rely on being able to read the Windows log for many reasons and filling them up in this manor means that we need to remove the client. We pay fo Dropbox Work and the client allows us, well, all the benifits the client bring, but this issue make it unteanble to operate.

Please look at this as a mater of urgency.

DemianLucis

Same here.

Every second since this version, piling now 83k logs.

edgar76

84K and counting, this is ridiculous

DemianLucis

According to this post the Dropbox Service can be disabled as it seem to have no effect on the syncing capabilities of the softrware. I have done this just now, w/o negative effect. But I would be careful here.

GlenGordon

For anyone who might care about more of the technical details of what's going on, I may be able to add a few puzzle pieces.

I did some looking around in

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Dropbox\Client\driver_amd64"

and in particular at the dbx.inf file that's used for installing dbx.sys and the dbx_svc.exe service for controlling it.

The dbx.sys driver is a Hierarchical Storage Manager filter driver which my limited Googling reveals is related to sending and retrieving seldom used files to/from slower/offline storage.

There's code in dbx_svc.exe to start/stop the dbx.sys driver (FilterLoad/ FilterUnload calls).

At least on my system, the driver is never started (perhaps it's supposed to be started conditionally) but then the dbx_svc.exe unconditionally trys to communicate with it.

I now feel very comfortable stopping the dbx_svc service discussed in other answers but also changing the start type of the service to Disabled which should keep it from starting the next time I boot. (Let's hope there isn't some other Dropbox process that has the privileges to change the start type back to automatic.)

Ender_Li

Me too.

forcefx2

I ran a quick powershell to disable this service.

get-service -Name dbx | Stop-Service -NoWait |Set-Service -StartupType Disabled;get-service -Name dbx

ner0

@forcefx2 wrote:
I ran a quick powershell to disable this service.
get-service -Name dbx | Stop-Service -NoWait |Set-Service -StartupType Disabled;get-service -Name dbx

THIS! Thanks.

Also an alternative, run from an elevated cmd prompt:

sc stop DbxSvc & sc config DbxSvc start=disabled

To Dropbox devs reading: you are pitiful.

Ross_S

Hi all,

First: Many apologies for the delay in jumping in here, I wanted to make sure I had a concrete update for you all.

So, for context: What is Dbxsvc? :

I've added a section to the help center article: https://www.dropbox.com/help/business/smart-sync (I say section, it's more of a note at the bottom under the driver FAQ).

Why is it failing to connect / what's going wrong?:

With that in mind, we understand that some of you do wish to see this behaviour.

Why aren't we fixing this?:

The new beta version is the first to include a fix:

https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Desktop-client-builds/Beta-Build-31-3-15/m-p/231950#M4152

pcrockcx

same happens to me. windows logs are filling up with these errors and the machine is wasting cpu.

My advice .. permantly disable this service .. dropbox seems to run file without it.

Of course I would like to know what this service does !

Is anyone from dropbx saying they are at least "looking at the problem" ??

mmillennial

So it's an issue you know about, caused by something you know about, and instead of maybe adding an option during setup to disable features for business users, you're just reducing the number of times that a completely baffling Event Log entry gets logged? That's the biggest kludge I've ever heard of. What a joke!

ner0

@Ross_S wrote:
I see we have a number of pretty interesting, creative suggestions on how to disable, coupled with queries if it's safe to disable it. I'm of course not going to endorse a process that disables part of our software, should a feature or functionality cause user pain then we would want to know.

Guess what, your awesome feature is causing pain, lots of it. In some cases it disrupts the system and/or the ability of a sysadmin to debug system's problems due to your superb idea of logging the same dong evry gdmnn second thus cluttering the event log with useless crap.

@Ross_S wrote:
My main concern around anyone disabling it is that in the future you may need this process, Smart Sync won't work correctly, you can reach out to support but this custom change you've made will be hard for us to diagnose as the root cause of whatever issue you experience.

If that's the case, then it explains a lot... especially why this is being handled so passively.

Your main concern should be that this feature is causing issues for those who aren't using it.

Server_Align

OMG you added a service to install a driver, that only a small set of your customers require, great I just remembered why we canceled our business account!

As to "pretty interesting, creative suggestions on how to disable", I think you lost the plot, disabling a service with the service control manager configeration tool IS HOW YOU ARE MEANT TO! But no no what the Frack would Microsoft know about it, I mean they arent DB and all.

As to "Because it fails to connect, Windows treats this as a trigger to write to the log.", talk about BS. The service writes that message to the log not windows being triggered, the servioce fails to make a connection, its writes to the event log, then resets to try again 1 second later.

Its this ONE SECOND thats stupid, that is as near as you get to polling! Why is it not checking if its needed and not doing anything if its not, no no retry a second later im sure everything will be different.

And your fix i to not flood the log, but keep flooding the system with pointless processing, great DB at its finest.

PS: to any who disable this using SC or the Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Administrative Tools\Services I would not trust that DB will change the settings on it on there next update, they ignore every other setting people make and just believe everyone wants 10+icon overlays and a bucnh of system hooks, no matter how many times they were removed. I dont expect a change with this either. I would suggest locating the EXE and changing its permissions to deny SYSTEM any access to it, that way the service will fail to start, and the updater wont be able to change the file.... (dont do it if you want Smart Sync working of course)

Crumb93

The beta did not correct the issue for me. I'm still seeing quite a bit logged from DbxSvc. I stopped the service manually and set it to disabled as a result.