Selfhosted

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.

Mine has always been slow. I started on a raspberry pi but later on a NUC and even on my VPS at Hetzner, it was always like you describe. Because I only used it for calendar, adressbook and sharing a few files I replaced it with Radicale for CalDav and CardDav and Syncthing for sharing files.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

It was way worse when I tried the snap tho

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.

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).

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.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

11 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 10 acronyms.

[Thread #566 for this sub, first seen 3rd Mar 2024, 08:45] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

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?

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

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

Pretty sluggish for me as well. Bare metal install with Apache, PHP 8.3, since a few days PostgreSQL and the whole Redis memcached opcache whatevercache stuff. Next step would be to check if the AIO Docker is the magical thing that makes it fly.

Some 8 core CPU I'm too lazy to look up, 16 GB RAM and two HDDs. SSDs would probably help, I guess.

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.

Docker, using the nextcloud:stable image (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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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. :)