I was haing some trouble (OOMing and crashing) with Dropbox running on an old Ubuntu laptop so I wrote a couple of scripts to keep it in check. The first one shuts down Dropbox when a threshold load average is met (4.00). And the second one restarts the Dropbox process if it crashes.
*/10 * * * * ~/dropbox_restarter.sh >> ~/dropbox_restarter.log
*/1 * * * * ~/dropbox_load_limiter.sh >> ~/dropbox_load_limiter.log