Nextcloud alternatives

Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 87 points – 10 months ago

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.

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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

I'll try this next time I need to restore the DB from backup, cheers!

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.

How is NC using redis? I can't see any links from the NC container

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,
  ),

Thanks!

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...)