How responsive is your Nextcloud?

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.

MOUCHE_A_MERDE,

I use it on cheap vps since ~4yrs and work “well” but I’ve never had a single major update that didn’t have an issue on my LXC/Alpine container 😒 One moment it’s the packages name that have changed, one time it’s PHP version, another it’s a config, another is a addon, last time that was opcache, … and I’m a bit tired of having to spend hours each time doing maintenance of it.

I really think I’m going to go back to something simpler but more solid like an SSHFS or similar.

NENathaniel,
@NENathaniel@lemmy.ca avatar

I run Nextcloud on an old laptop (i5-8500h) and tbh I find it super fast and responsive. I’ve barely done any tinkering or customization

Father_Redbeard,
@Father_Redbeard@lemmy.ml avatar

I’ve shit-talk NC so much on here and other forums but for some reason kept feeling compelled to try to make it work. I’ve tried a few of the Community Docker templates available on Unraid “store” as well as AIO. I’ve had issues with all of them. Then gave NextcloudPi a try on a spare Pi 4 (installed a SSD as boot instead of microSD) and it works much better. It’s still much slower than I think it should be, but this version is far and away more responsive than the others.

Seafile is a beast of an app that syncs and performs incredibly fast. Some folks won’t use it due to the git-like chunks it parses your data into on the server end (this is what accounts for the speed from what I’ve read). I understand the concerns in that regard, but I still like it and I have my own way to mitigate that concern.

ikidd,
@ikidd@lemmy.world avatar

Use the AIO. Its much faster than any other way I’ve had it set up and I’ve used NC for years. Easy to update, full featured, supported.

And anyone that tells you to use Own cloud instead doesn’t have a clue.

Spider89,

An issue I have with AIO is I can’t use an internal IP address, and I’m required to have a domain or revese proxy.

OwnCloud for now, NC for the manual install.

derpgon, (edited )

What do you mean no internal IP? I can access the instance on my local network via RPI address no problem.

EDIT: Realized I didn’t use AIO. Sorry.

Spider89,

Link

derpgon,

Ooooh, I just checked and I am indeed not running the AIO. Must be a new thing, and I though I had it because I didn’t set up much, but I really just used a premare docker-compose.yml, which is why I didn’t remember any advanced setup. It still uses multiple containers.

I stand corrected.

feinzer,
@feinzer@akko.airis.dev avatar

@Kalcifer @selfhosted it's quite slow for me. AIO docker setup

It was way worse when I tried the snap tho

Kalcifer,
@Kalcifer@sh.itjust.works avatar

As long as it’s faster than the snap, it’s worth it to me 😜

fungos, (edited )

mine was really sluggish for a long time, then I saw someone in here explaining their similar issue and their fix. I don’t have the post link, but it was related to DNS settings. Basically for some reason using my pihole dns made only nextcloud sluggish, the fix suggestion was to use 1.1.1.1, which worked. Now, it is a pretty fast nextcloud.

czardestructo,
@czardestructo@lemmy.world avatar

So on your Nextcloud server you use an external DNS and it greatly sped up you nextcloud? Because I noticed a few years back mine got slow and I cannot figure out why. It was about the time I enforced pihole dns with pfsense. I might need to try this.

Synnr,

That would make sense if the cause is some looping from hanging DNS lookups. Someone should (and likely has) notified the devs about this.

Another possible solution, from help.nextcloud.com/t/…/16

https://sopuli.xyz/pictrs/image/840d78c7-9386-496a-818b-b59c66992c41.webp

czardestructo,
@czardestructo@lemmy.world avatar

I’m going to have to give this a shot tonight, need to make a pfsense rule to allow the server to get out and then change its DNS. Regarding php, my current config is the following because I have over 64gigs of ram and went through great length to get Nextcloud to cache MORE into ram:


<span style="color:#323232;">pm.max_requests = 50000 #set higher, the process is recyled after 50k calls to prevent memory leaks
</span><span style="color:#323232;">pm.max_children = 1000
</span><span style="color:#323232;">pm.start_servers = 60
</span><span style="color:#323232;">pm.min_spare_servers = 30
</span><span style="color:#323232;">pm.max_spare_servers = 120
</span>
terminhell,

Overall good. The only slowness is right after login. After it loads everything it’s pretty responsive. Using the snap version (I know, snap bad. But in this case it was the only way I got it going.).

Self updates,.get email notifications when it updateab

possiblylinux127,

I’ve never experienced slowness and I’m accessing it from behind two proxies and a VPN. Can you share some information about your setup?

vegetaaaaaaa,
@vegetaaaaaaa@lemmy.world avatar

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

marcos,

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.)

cecilkorik,
@cecilkorik@lemmy.ca avatar

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.

atzanteol, (edited )

You’ve told us nothing about your hardware.

I’ve been running nextcloud for some time with this setup:


<span style="color:#323232;">KVM virtual machine with 4 cores / 8 GiB RAM
</span><span style="color:#323232;">docker image: `nextcloud:28.0.2-apache` with db: `mariadb:11.1`
</span>

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.

LDerJim,

No problems here, running the official helm chart

maiskanzler,

I am very happy with mine and have only ever had one hiccup during updating that was due to my Dockerfile removing one dependency to many. I’ve run it bare metal (apache, mariadb) as well as containerized (derived custom image, traefik, mariadb). Both were okay in speed after applying all steps from the documentation.

Having the database on your fastest drive is definitely very important. Whenever I look at htop while making big copies or moves, it’s always mariadb that’s shuffling stuff around.

In my opinion there are 2 things that make nextcloud (appear) slow:

  1. Managing the ton of metadata in the db that is used by nextcloud to provide the enhanced functionality
  2. It is/was a webpage rendered mostly on the server.

The first issue is hard to tackle, because it is intrinsic and also has different optimums for different deployment scales. Optimizing databases is beyond my skillset and therefore I stick to the recommendations.

The second issue is slowly being worked around, because many applications on nextcloud now resemble SPAs, that are highly interactive and are rendered by your browser. That reduces page reloads and makes it feel more smooth.

All that said, I barely use the webinterface, because I rarely use the collaboration features. If I have to create a share I usually do that on the app because that’s where I send the link to people. Most of my usecase is just syncing files, calendars and contacts.

atzanteol,

Containers run on “bare metal”…

Tiritibambix,
@Tiritibambix@lemmy.ml avatar

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.

ShortN0te,

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.

atzanteol,

Containers run on “bare metal”.

teawrecks,

More specifically, the container is run on bare metal if the host is running on bare metal. You are correct in this thread, not sure why you’re being downvoted. I guess people don’t know what virtualization technology is or when it is used.

If the nextcloud container is slow, it’s for reasons other than virtualization.

atzanteol,

not sure why you’re being downvoted.

LaNgUaGe EvOlVeS. 🙄

teawrecks,

Wait what? I’m saying what you said is correct. Am I the one who’s confused here?

LufyCZ,

Not in this context. Bare metal means all packages and services installed and running directly on the host, not through docker/lxc/vms

atzanteol, (edited )

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.

LufyCZ,

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

teawrecks,

It’s all about where the packages and services are installed

No. Your packages and services could be on a network share on the other side of the world, but where they are run is what matters here. Processes are always loaded into, and run from main memory.

“Running on bare metal” refers to whether the CPU the process is being run on is emulated/virtualized (ex. via Intel VT-x) or not.

A VM uses virtualization to run an OS, and the processes are running within that OS, thus neither is running on bare metal. But the purpose of containers is to run them wherever your host OS is running. So if your host is on bare metal, then the container is too. You are not emulating or virtualizing any hardware.

Here’s an article explaining the difference in more detail if needed.

atzanteol, (edited )

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.

LufyCZ,

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.

atzanteol,

It’s just what it means in this specific context.

“I used the wrong words but I feel like justifying them as right.”

This is that whole “I know literally means literally the opposite of what I meant but deal with it” bullshit. Whatever, I’ll not argue with such lunacy. Words mean whatever you want them to.

atzanteol,

He look - I drive a car with a V8! I mean I know it only has 4 cylinders in-line but I count them twice and I like the letter “V” so in this specific context it’s a V8!

LufyCZ,

Words evolve, and sometimes, they gain new meanings. “Bare metal” is not a scientific terms, and so it can be bent depending on the context.

You can either accept that or not, it doesn’t change the fact that that’s what it now can mean.

Synnr,

Is docker virtualized or otherwise emulating something? It’s just a way to package things, like an installer? Then it’s bare metal.

I had to look this up too, I thought docker containers were virtualized.

Auli,

Never had an issue with mine. And running fine. Only thing I have done is use mariadb.

tubbadu,

Now I just recommend Owncloud or seafile. They’re both really easy to install and just work out of the box.

Which one is lighter on your opinion?

Tiritibambix,
@Tiritibambix@lemmy.ml avatar

Lighter, I dont know. Faster, I’d say owncloud. YMMV

kreliac,

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.

poVoq, (edited )
@poVoq@slrpnk.net avatar

Configuring a Redis cache really helps in my experience.

But I also recently noticed something odd: it works quite well on my usual internet connection, but when I traveled abroad it became excruciatingly slow, more so than the admittably worse mobile connection would have let me assume. Something about it seems to require a relatively stable internet connection on the client side it seems.

maiskanzler,

That might be due to your ISP’s routing and interconnects. They usually have good routes to big services and might lack good connections between home users in different countries or on different continents.

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