Dropbox keeps eating memory on my Mac with high CPU, and eventually crashes the system

Question

Dropbox starts out using about 400 MB of memory or so on my Mac running Tahoe 26.6.2 and within a few days it is consuming 30 GIGS or more of RAM and eventually my system crashes and I have to restart.

How do I stop this from happening? Thanks

Megan · Answer

Hey @jsruzicka, welcome to our Community!

To help troubleshoot, could you please share your Dropbox app version, and its current syncing status? You can check this by hovering your mouse over the Dropbox icon in your menu bar next to your Wi-Fi icon.

Also, please take a look at this Help Center article for tips on handling high CPU usage.

To help us narrow things down further:

* Open the Activity Monitor to see if any antivirus, security, or backup software is repeatedly accessing your Dropbox folder. If so, try temporarily disabling those apps to see if CPU usage drops.
* Check "Sync and storage" in your app preferences for any reported sync issues.
* Right-click directly on your local Dropbox folder, select Get info, and send me a screenshot of the window that appears. This will help verify that you have fewer than 300,000 files synced locally, as exceeding this soft limit can impact app performance.

Keep me posted, and we'll take it from there!

jsruzicka · Answer

Thanks gave these things a try. Will see how it plays out in a week or so.