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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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…