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Starting the Dropbox desktop app on another machine kills my local session (Ubuntu)

I encounter a 100% reproducible but very weird error.

I have two machines running Ubuntu Linux, my laptop (24.10) and my server (22.04). I used to use Dropbox to keep the files on both of them in sync for years and it has always worked perfectly (I am on a paid plan and have a pretty large amount of files). I use the latest version of the dropbox client for linux on both machines.

Now the problem:

When the dropbox client is running on my laptop and I start up the dropbox client on the server, reliably, after about 10 seconds, my local laptop freezes and kills my X session (i.e., all apps are killed, I am logged out and presented with a login screen). In the meantime, on the server, the dropbox client has been killed but the server keeps running just fine.

This is very disconcerting, how can what I do on the remote machine cause my local machine to crash?? Any advice on what I could try to resolve this? I have already tried setting up the limit for inotify with

sudo sysctl -w fs.inotify.max_user_watches=100000

Any help would be greatly appreciated! I am considering canceling my Dropbox subscription.

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Comments

Walter

Hey @mmittner - thanks for bringing this to our attention.

Just to make sure we're on the same page, can you clarify the version/status of the Dropbox desktop app running on your devices and how long has it been since you first noticed this?

Approximately how many files are you syncing locally on the machines you mentioned?

Let us know more and we'll take it from there.

mmittner

Hei, thanks for the quick answer!

This is my local dropbox version and my local dropbox contains 350k files:

$ dropbox version
Dropbox daemon version: 218.4.4348
Dropbox command-line interface version: 2024.04.17
$ find . -type f | wc -l
350385

The status is "Up to date" and syncing works fine (can confirm on the dropbox website). I have noticed, that the client recently "gets stuck" after I put my laptop to sleep (i.e., it did not sync to dropbox, only when I do "pause syncing" and then "resume syncing" does the central dropbox get updated).

I noticed the issue a couple of weeks ago but it may have existed a bit longer.

Walter

I see, thanks for the additional information there @mmittner - much appreciated. Could you try using selective sync to remove some folders in order to make the app's load a little smaller, namely under 300K files?

Let us know if the behavior changes at all afterwards.