My Nextcloud has always been sluggish — navigating and interacting isn’t snappy/responsive, changing between apps is very slow, loading tasks is horrible, etc. I’m curious what the experience is like for other people. I’d also be curious to know how you have your Nextcloud set up (install method, server hardware, any other relevent special configs, etc.). Mine is essentially just a default install of Nextcloud Snap.
Edit (2024-03-03T09:00Z): I should clarify that I am specifically talking about the web interface and not general file sync capabilites. Specifically, I notice the sluggishness the most when interacting with the calendar, and tasks.
Nextcloud pleases A LOT 10% of it’s users. Those 10% are composed by tech savvy people, coders and developpers that spent countless hours tinkering with their instance.
I’m one of the 90% left. Despite really wanting to use nextcloud and trying to set it up correctly for 2 years, I finally gave up and I feel much happier in my life, in my work, with my family and friends, and they thank me for that.
Now I just recommend Owncloud or seafile. They’re both really easy to install and just work out of the box.
Out of habit and convenience, I keep a nextcloud running on oracle free tier just for what it’s good at: caldav and contacts.
I just moved my files from nextcloud to seafile, founded that I don’t really need chat, calendar, tasks and other things, only need to store files and have it synced between my devices.
Nextcloud works for my small company and I’m not going to change it for now.
Never had an issue with mine. And running fine. Only thing I have done is use mariadb.
The out of the box experience of the containerized nextcloud is actually really bad. Had it running bare metal with apache and it was way faster.
But have you tried the official AIO docker compose file? Basically copy the redis stuff from there and you are good to go.
Containers run on “bare metal”.
Not in this context. Bare metal means all packages and services installed and running directly on the host, not through docker/lxc/vms
Yes - in this context containers run on bare metal. They run directly on the host. They even show up in the host’s process list with PIDs. There is no virtual machine between an executable running in a docker image and the CPU on the host.
Have you read my comment? It’s about where the packages and services are installed.
In this case, they’re installed in the container, not on the host
What is it you think the “metal” is in in the phrase “running on bare metal?”
Your comment is irrelevant. Who cares in what directory or disk image the packages are installed? If I run in a “chroot jail” am I not “running on bare metal?” What if I include a library in /opt/application/lib? Does it matter if the binaries are on an NFS share? This is all irrelevant.
The phrase means to be not running in any emulation. To answer my question above - the “metal” is the CPU (edit: and other hardware).
edit2: I mean - it’s the defining characteristic of containers that they execute on bare metal unlike VMs and (arguably - I won’t get into it) hypervisors. There is no hardware abstraction at all. They just run natively.
It’s just what it means in this specific context.
They’re not running directly on the host, with directly meaning directly.
If you go by definition, I agree with you, but the definition is not always the thing to go off of.
Mine is… eh. It’s alright. I don’t use any of the apps. Just the actual sync functionality. Sometimes when I’m moving files around there’s a problem where the entire thing just stops responding. My MediaWiki instance still works, just not Nextcloud. Not sure why this happens and not sure if it also happens to other people.
For comparison, it is running on a Contabo VPS M
I run linuxserver.io docker container, disabled almost all apps and its been running rock solid and quite fast on old celeron. It takes 3-5 sec to open a web page, but I mostly use desktop/android app anyway
What hardware are you running it on? I set mine up originally on a raspberry pi 3b and the web interface was very slow, but upgrading it to a RPi4 with 4GB RAM made a massive difference. Though I suspect some of that was that the data and database were being stored on an external SSD in both cases, the RPi4 had a usb 3 interface and dedicated Ethernet, but the 3b had a single USB 2 bus to share between the Ethernet and SSD.
MIne is on a RPi4 4 GB as well (the AIO container) with two SSD and the performance of the frontend are meh… But I seldom use the web part anyway and mainly rely on the desktop client/android App, which work just fine.
Docker, using the
nextcloud:stableimage (not-all in-one) with postgres, behind nginx, and finally ZFS with 2x modern HDDs for storage. I run the stock apps plus a small handful, and have carried the same database through many versions over the last 5 years.It’s usable, but definitely not snappy.
The web interface for files is fine. Not instantaneous at all but not a huge problem. I have about 1TB of files (images and videos) in one folder, then varying files everywhere else. I suspect that the number of files (but probably not the size) is causing the slowdown.
Switching to, for example, the notes app is incredibly slow, and the NC Android app is just as bad.
Mine runs very smoothly. I set it up on a Raspberry Pi 4 (4GB) with an external 1TB drive. I run it in docker with the official (?) image and can’t remember having set any special config. If you have any questions, I’m happy to answer them. :)
Which docker are you using? Is it the AIO docker?
I had to look it up. It’s the community image (apache version) from https://hub.docker.com/_/nextcloud/ which I use together with a mariadb and redis image.
Mine is not great but is ok. Main special thing I did was put it on a vps very close to home, for short ping time. That was to get lower latency voice chat with nextcloud talk, but I haven’t been using that at all.
Mine is nice and quick in regards to the web interface and general functions. However I run it on a server at home and my upload speed isn’t the best, so if I need to pull a larger file (Files On Demand enabled) then obviously the transfer speed of the file is a bit sluggish.
Hosted on a VM with 16GB RAM, 4 cores. Using the NextcloudAIO docker deployment option, all behind an Apache reverse proxy (I have a bunch of other services on another VM that all have reverse proxy access in place as well).
Did you do anything special configuration-wise, or did you, more or less, just deploy the AIO docker as-is?
Nothing too special, just had to do some fiddling to get the Apache reverse proxy working correctly. Now I believe they have a pre-made example for it, but back then they only had nginx. I stick with Apache because that’s still what I know. Might start learning nginx, but my main work isn’t in web stuff.
Docker behind a Traefik proxy with crowdsec checking (adds additional lag). Ryzen 2700x 32GB local machine. All storage on SSD.
The web interface is very usable, switching subpages takes maybe half a second max without it being cached by the browser.
Could of course be quicker (as basically everything ever), but as we mostly use it with the Windows sync clients and Android apps we never really have any issues.
Which docker image do you use? AIO?
No. This installation is so old it precedes the AIO image. “Standard” docker image, redis, mariadb.
Same.
I’ve always run Nextcloud as a docker behind an NGINX/Let’s Encrypt proxy and login sometimes takes over a minute, even if I access the Nextcloud docker directly without the proxy. It’s a very frustrating experience to use a self hosted Nextcloud.
Which docker did you use, out of curiosity?
This one: https://hub.docker.com/_/nextcloud/
Mine runs very smooth. I guess it’s a matter of hardware or Ressource allocation?
I have a fujitsu thin client with a 4 core Celeron CPU and 8gb RAM. Nextcloud and Maria DB run in separate containers in proxmox.
I am the only user. I have only office, face recognition and maps installed. Other than that I use calender, contact and Foto sync.
No problems here, running the official helm chart
You’ve told us nothing about your hardware.
I’ve been running nextcloud for some time with this setup:
KVM virtual machine with 4 cores / 8 GiB RAM docker image: `nextcloud:28.0.2-apache` with db: `mariadb:11.1`The UI has never been what one would call… “fast”. Especially on first load of a page or directory. It’s been adequate for me though. Once I click around a bit it caches enough things to feel fairly responsive. I also mount /var/lib/nextcloud off a network share so I’m sure that hits my performance some as well.
Nextcloud leans on the database a lot so be sure to have a local and quick storage for it (no - don’t run it on your raspberry pi). There are also cleanup cron jobs and indexes that need to be updated when doing upgrades that help performance as well.
I stopped using it because it has an extremely complex protocol, with very large bloat that increases with the number of files, and incredibly sensitive to latency.
When I stopped syncing directories because they would take days to upload and started compressing them so they would finish in 10 minutes, I decided it had to go. (Oh, and it’s extremely sensitive to network problems too.)
I still use Nextcloud for syncing documents and other basic stuff that is relatively simple. But I started getting glacial sync times consuming large amounts of CPU and running into lots of conflicts as more and more got added. For higher performance, more demanding sync tasks involving huge numbers of files, large file sizes, and rapid changes, I’ve started using Syncthing and am much, much happier with it. Nextcloud sync seems to be sort of a jack of all trades, master of none, kind of thing. Whereas Syncthing is a one trick pony that does that trick very, very well.
Quite fast.
KVM/libvirt VM with 4GB RAM and 4vCores shared with a dozen other services, storage is not the fastest (qcow2-backed disks on a ext4 partition inside a LUKS volume on a 5400RPM hard drive… I might move it so a SSD sometime soon) so features highly dependent on disk I/O (thumbnailing) are sometimes sluggish. There is an occasional slowdown, I suppose caused by APCu caches periodically being dropped, but once a page is loaded and the cache is warmed up, it becomes fast again.
Standard apache + php-fpm + postgresql setup as described in the Nextcloud official documentation, automated through this ansible role
