Slow Upload speed to Dropbox

I have been having issues with slow upload speed to Dropbox, and Dropbox support is claiming it is related to RAIDrive.

Here is the Dropbox response:

The Dropbox API does have a general rate limiting system, though not all 429s and 503s indicate explicit rate limiting. Regardless of what kind an app is receiving, the app should be written to automatically handle these. The following is information that would be helpful for the developer. If you are not the developer of the third party app(s), you may wish to reach out to them regarding this.

I see in this case you’re getting both ‘too_many_requests’ and ‘too_many_write_operations’. In any case that you get a 429 or 503 the best practice is to retry the request, respecting the Retry-After header if given in the response, or using an exponential back-off, if not. This is something that should be built in to the app to be handled automatically.

For example, if you’re making multiple changes at the same time in the same account or shared folder, you can run in to this ‘too_many_write_operations’ error, which is “lock contention”. That’s not explicit rate limiting, but rather a result of how Dropbox works on the backend. This is a technical inability to make a modification in the account or shared folder at the time of the API call. This error indicates that there was simultaneous activity in the account or shared folder preventing your app from making the state-modifying call (e.g., adding, editing, moving, copying, or deleting files/folders) it is attempting. The simultaneous activity could be coming from your app itself, or elsewhere, e.g., from the user’s desktop client. It can come from the same user, or another member of a shared folder. You can find more information about lock contention here.

In short, to avoid this error, you should avoid making multiple concurrent state modifications. E.g., don’t issue multiple such requests at a time, and use batch endpoints whenever possible. For example, for upload multiples items, you can use upload sessions with /2/files/upload_session/finish_batch. I recommend referring to the Performance Guide for more information. Again, if you’re not the developer of the app, you may want to ask them to implement this, if they haven’t already. That won’t guarantee that you won’t run in to this error though, as contention can still come from other sources.