[time-nuts] Dropbox is cool, but...

[John Ackermann N8UR]

So I was clever and decided to log some PPS data to a folder within my 
"Dropbox" folder.  Strange results followed... the whole system just 
bogged down, and even fairly slow serial data dropped characters.

It turns out that the culprit was the Dropbox daemon continuously trying 
to sync the file as it changed every second.  It didn't manifest as CPU 
overload or anything obvious; the problem was apparently thrashing in 
the I/O system.  Once I started dumping the data to a "normal" 
directory, the problem went away.  (This was on Linux, by the way).

So, a lesson learned -- don't stream unbuffered data, even at a low 
rate, into a sync'd folder!

John