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In this blogpost we’ll talk about the old Nginx-based traffic infrastructure, its pain points, and the benefits we gained by migrating to Envoy . We’ll compare Nginx to Envoy across many software engineering and operational dimensions. We’ll also briefly touch on the migration process, its current state, and some of…
Editor’s preface: When I first joined Dropbox in May 2017, we were at the tail end of our CoffeeScript to TypeScript migration. If you wanted to make changes to a CoffeeScript file, it was considered common courtesy to convert it to TypeScript while you were at it. Parts of our codebase were still using…
One of the best ways to find ways to improve performance, we’ve found, is to work closely with our customers. We love shared troubleshooting sessions with their own engineering teams to find and eliminate bottlenecks.
On Thursday, November 18, 2021, Dropbox did not go down. On a normal day this would be a non-event—a sign that everything was operating as usual. However, this day was anything but usual. At 5:00 pm PT, a group of Dropboxers were huddled on a Zoom call when the command was given to physically unplug our San Jose data…
Dropbox syncs petabytes of data every day across millions of desktop clients. It is vital that we constantly improve the sync experience for our users, to increase our users’ productivity in their everyday lives. We also constantly strive to better leverage our infrastructure, increasing Dropbox’s operational…
Recently, we translated the predictive power of machine learning (ML) into $1.7 million a year in infrastructure cost savings by optimizing how Dropbox generates and caches document previews. Machine learning at Dropbox already powers commonly-used features such as search , file and folder suggestions , and OCR in…
Photos are among the most common types of files in Dropbox, but searching for them by filename is even less productive than it is for text-based files. When you're looking for that photo from a picnic a few years ago, you surely don't remember that the filename set by your camera was 2017-07-04 12.37.54.jpg .
Executing a full rewrite of the Dropbox sync engine was pretty daunting. (Read more about our goals and how we made the decision in our previous post here .) Doing so meant taking the engine that powers Dropbox on hundreds of millions of user’s machines and swapping it out mid-flight. To pull this off, we knew we…
Over the past four years, we've been working hard on rebuilding our desktop client's sync engine from scratch. The sync engine is the magic behind the Dropbox folder on your desktop computer, and it's one of the oldest and most important pieces of code at Dropbox. We're proud to announce today that we've shipped this…
Dropbox is well known for storing users’ files—but it’s equally important we can retrieve content quickly when our users need it most. For the Retrieval Experiences team, that means building a search experience that is as fast, simple, and powerful as possible. But when we conducted a research study in July 2022, one…
HelloSign is a Dropbox company that provides a Web-based eSignature solution: If you have a document you want someone to sign, you upload the document file, then show you an editor in which you place all the fields to build the form the recipient will fill out—signatures, dates, initials, etc. You send this prepared…
We migrated from Mercurial to Git in 2014 to improve local performance and began consolidating our repositories that hosted our backend code. But as this monorepo grew, we experienced Git performance issues that grew linearly with the number of files we added. Inconveniently, this problem was the most severe on…
One of the challenges of application engineering within an established company like Dropbox is to break out of the cycle of incremental improvements and look at a problem fresh. Our colleagues who do user research help by regularly reminding us of the customer’s perspective, but so can our friends and family when they…
A few weeks ago, we released a whole bunch of new features to Dropbox Plus, our paid plan for personal users. While we started as a storage company, we‘ve grown to be a hub to manage your digital life. About 150 people worked on this launch: engineers, product managers, designers, copywriters, and many more.
Dropbox, to our customers, needs to be a reliable and responsive service. As a company, we’ve had to scale constantly since our start, today serving more than 700M registered users in every time zone on the planet who generate at least 300,000 requests per second. Systems that worked great for a startup hadn’t scaled…
I joined Dropbox not long after graduating with a Master’s degree in computer science. Aside from an internship, this was my first big-league engineering job. My team had already begun designing a critical internal service that most of our software would use: It would handle asynchronous computing requests behind the…