PSA: Box.com has *serious* performance issues in directories with thousands of files

[durval (Durval Menezes)]

@ncw

I asked on the box developer forum , and it turns out there is an API which will do what I need called the preflight check .

Its purpose is to see if files exist before you upload them which is why I hadn't twigged it is useful, but it does exactly what I need to avoid listing the directory as in it turns a (fileName, directoryID) into a fileID. I needed to call another api method to turn the fileID into the full file info, but I think both these API calls will be very quick compared to listing directories.

Amazing, @ncw! Thank you very much for all your great work, you and rclone are the best!

@ncw

I'd be grateful if you'd try to do that @durval to see how much (if any!) performance gain you get when syncing large directories.

It would be my pleasure, but at this exact moment I'm STILL (for 3 days now) without both write (upload) AND read (download) access to my data. I opened a ticket back then and they just replied, basically telling me that if I want READ access to my data, I would have to first cancel the account (so they really don't want me there) and only then they will graciously provide me with 30 days to copy my data out.

So I don't think I will be able to test this I'm really sorry about that

Perhaps there's someone around who can still upload to Box to have that tested? I will give it a holler in the public thread and see if we can get some volunteers.