Boot time in Ubuntu with Dropbox

I remember, some time ago, my system used to boot in few seconds and I even tried to optimize the time by installing minimal window systems. I had some friends who bought solid state hard disks, who came down to five seconds. Some linux distributions focused explicitly on boot time. Now, my booting time is extremely slow and I have to wait up to several minutes for my computer to boot, even on my new desktop computer with a ...standard installation. A significant part of the booting time is taken up by dropbox and in this post I explain what I did to bring down this time and to get at least a bit more reasonable boot time.

My ubuntu startup is sometimes extremely slow. When I check the CPU usage, dropbox comes up as one of the heaviest shares. What to do? One option is to change the nice level (process priority) of dropbox. But then, why not use a more specific limit? cpulimit attempts to limit the cpu usage of a process, so let's use that with dropbox!

We start by installing cpulimit. In ubuntu

sudo apt-get install cpulimit

... will do

We need to identify the process which we want to limit. One way is by process id (pid). Let's get the dropbox process id:

ps aux | grep dropbox | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}'

There is another option to use the absolute path, but I am using the pid here.

Now we need to plug this into the cpulimit syntax, which is as follows:

cpulimit --pid= --limit=

The command can now look like this:

cpulimit --pid=$(ps aux | grep dropbox | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}') --limit=10

In the terminal, I put an ampersand at the end, to run the command in the background.

For now, everything seems to run smoothly. Dropbox' cpu share is reduced and the system responses seem quicker. Let's see how it works...

I enter this command in the gnome menu of startup applications, behind the dropbox command. Combined it can look as follows:

echo "nice dropbox start -i & cpulimit --pid=$(ps aux | grep dropbox | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}') --limit=10" | at now + 10 min

Enjoy. Please leave a comment below for questions and suggestions.