So far my experience with Nextcloud has been that it is a pain in the arse to install, and once it’s installed is slow as anything. Literally couldn’t run it on my pi 3b, now got it up and running pretty nicely on a NUC but it’s still not great. Have caching set up.
I have the notes app installed on my android phone and I can never used rich text editing because it gives timeout error.
This shouldn’t be this complicated. All I want is to de-Google my documents and notes, and self-host my kanban. I don’t really need the rest though it’s nice to have the options.
Do people use alternatives? Am I doing something completely wrong? I set it up using nginx which I know is not supported, but the alternative using Docker AIO didn’t allow me to use custom port easily.
I seriously suggest you give Nextcloud another go, this time under Docker. Very simple to do.
Save the following in a new folder as docker-compose.yml
version: '3'
volumes:
db:
services:
nextcloud-app:
image: nextcloud
container_name: nextcloud-app
restart: always
volumes:
- ./data:/var/www/html
environment:
- MYSQL_PASSWORD=changeme
- MYSQL_DATABASE=nextcloud
- MYSQL_USER=nextcloud
- MYSQL_HOST=nextcloud-db
ports:
- "80:80"
links:
- nextcloud-db
nextcloud-db:
image: mariadb
container_name: nextcloud-db
restart: always
command: --transaction-isolation=READ-COMMITTED --binlog-format=ROW
volumes:
- db:/var/lib/mysql
environment:
- MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=changeme
- MYSQL_PASSWORD=changeme
- MYSQL_DATABASE=nextcloud
- MYSQL_USER=nextcloud
run this command in the folder -
docker-compose up -d
open http://localhost
I suspect nextcloud having performance issues with slow Disk IO. With rootless containers I had a much worse performance than rootfull. Also using MySQL Backend instead of SQLite did speedup the performance.
Nevertheless I have the same problems with nextcloud as you stated. Pretty much not as usable as I thought.
It’s on a SATA drive, albeit hard drive not ssd and I’m using mariadb. Everybody seems to suggest I need a beefier server but as a developer myself, the functionality of the software doesn’t seem to warrant anything more powerful.
Software config optimizations help a little bit but my biggest improvement was moving the DB to SSD. Spinning disks are great for capacity but not for DB performance. Random I/O is a big factor for them and those drives drop in performance so fast for that type of I/O due to physically spinning media.
I started out using Owncloud and later switched to Nextcloud once that fork was stable. For all my uses it has always needed beefy hardware to run well but I definitely have way more junk files in synced folders than I should & rarely clean things up.
How much memory? I think nextcloud wants around 8gb to run happily (ymmv). I’ve tried it with smaller sizes and ran into issues.
Yes I have 8gb of ram, but it seems insane that it needs that much considering what it is doing.
I think nextcloud wants around 8gb to run happily (ymmv).
As a developer myself, where did it go wrong?
Just want to say that I’ve been there. There was a time my Nextcloud install was incredibly slow. Fortunately (or unfortunately?), it is featureful enough and widely supported that once you figure this issue out, it is a nice service to keep running.
For me, adding Redis was essential. It doesn’t really make sense to me why (nothing I do on Nextcloud is intensive or data heavy) but it has greatly improved the performance of my app.
My entire setup is a containerized Nextcloud, Nextcloud Cron, MariaDB (if I knew Postgres was an option, I would’ve chosen that), and Redis:
version: '2'
services:
nextcloud:
container_name: nextcloud
image: nextcloud:27-apache
restart: unless-stopped
environment:
- MYSQL_PASSWORD=nextcloud
- MYSQL_HOST=db
- MYSQL_DATABASE=nextcloud
- MYSQL_USER=nextcloud
labels:
- 'public-service=true'
- 'traefik.enable=true'
- 'traefik.http.routers.cloud.rule=Host(`nextcloud.some.domain`)'
- 'traefik.http.routers.cloud.tls=true'
- 'traefik.http.services.cloud.loadbalancer.server.port=80'
volumes:
- /some/data/dir/nextcloud/data:/var/www/html
- /some/external/dir:/wew:ro
nextcloud-cron:
image: nextcloud:27-apache
restart: unless-stopped
command: [/cron.sh]
environment:
- MYSQL_HOST=db
- MYSQL_DATABASE=nextcloud
- MYSQL_USER=nextcloud
- MYSQL_PASSWORD=nextcloud
volumes:
- /some/data/dir/nextcloud/data:/var/www/html
- /some/external/dir/:/wew:ro
db:
image: mariadb:10.4
restart: unless-stopped
environment:
MYSQL_DATABASE: nextcloud
MYSQL_USER: nextcloud
MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: nextcloud
volumes:
- /some/data/dir/nextcloud/db:/var/lib/mysql
mysqldump:
image: mariadb:10.4
depends_on: [db]
# restart: never # cronjob
labels:
- 'cron.schedule=0 0 8 * * ?'
entrypoint: [mysqldump, -h, db, -u, nextcloud, -pnextcloud, --all-databases, -r, /out/nextcloud.sql]
user: root
volumes:
- /some/data/dir/nextcloud/db-dump:/out
redis:
image: redis
restart: unless-stopped
For what it’s worth you can convert the database to postgres if you want. I tried it out a few weeks ago and went flawlessly.
https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/configuration_database/db_conversion.html
Yes, redis should be part of the standard install. Not doing it is just setting yourself up for disappointment.
Also I believe postgress has better performance than mariadb so no reason not to use that if you are setting it up from scratch.
Pg has significantly better performance in a smaller self hosted environment. Notably because you’re doing a balance of reading and writing, or mostly writing since data changes regularly. For large scale operations where reading data is the primary use, MariaDB/MySQL is faster.
I configured it in config.php directly, probably following https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/configuration_server/caching_configuration.html#id2
'memcache.local' => '\\OC\\Memcache\\APCu',
'memcache.distributed' => '\\OC\\Memcache\\Redis',
'memcache.locking' => '\\OC\\Memcache\\Redis',
'redis' =>
array (
'host' => 'redis',
'port' => 6379,
),
Can I ask why the separate NC container for cron? Also, I presume the mysqldump container is for easy db backups?
The separate cron container made the most sense to me. Other variants “work” but imo are mostly workarounds to avoid setting up a real cronjob. Beyond this I have no real reason, nor can I vouch that is is more or less performant than others.
Yes, the mysqldump container is for easier restores. It’s much easier to restore from a .sql file than a raw data dir that was copied while the DB was running ;) (speaking from experience…)
Nextcloud is not easy to setup, that´s right, but it is not this complicated. Use Postgres as database, it is faster than MySQL. Install Redis as Cache and configure PHP Cache too. This will speedup the most. I use nextcloud installed directly on the host, no docker. Another small guide is here for Postgres and Apache
For speed Seafile absolutely smokes Nextcloud.
If you create an account they’ll give a pro license (limited to 3 users) for free. Or you can stick with the always free community edition which works great too.
