How do I limit Dropbox's activity on the hard disk?

On startup, Dropbox runs files indexing, which brings the system pretty much to a stand still for three minutes.

Is there a way to restrict Dropbox from accessing the hard disk, or decrease the priority of Dropbox's access to the hard disk?

Solution 1:

Complementing the answer of Carlos D. Barranco, you can edit the launcher file located in /usr/share/applications/dropbox.desktop and permanently set a low priority start for dropbox.

In my case, it was also useful to limit the processor usage of dropbox. You can install package cpulimit: # apt-get install cpulimit

For example, to limit dropbox up to 20% processor usage: # cpulimit -b -e dropbox -l 20

In order to configure both low IO and low processing for dropbox automatically with the system launch, edit /usr/share/applications/dropbox.desktop and replace dropbox start -i by ionice -c 3 dropbox start -i && cpulimit -b -e dropbox -l 20

Command ionice will set idle priority for IO access and the parameter -l of cpulimit configures the processing limit in percentual values. More information on cpulimit can be found in: http://www.nixtutor.com/linux/changing-priority-on-linux-processes/

Solution 2:

The right command is the following:

ionice -c 3 dropbox start -i

But you have to be careful and deactivate dropbox check box "Start dropbox on system startup" in dropbox config. Otherwise, dropbox will restore the command in the config file to "dropbox start -i" (without ionice call).

Hope this helps.