What's wrong with Nextcloud, and why is it slow/clunky?
I hear people say that about Nextcloud often, which is part of why I haven't bothered setting it up yet.
Is there a technical reason why it's slow and clunky? Any problematic choices with how it was built?
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Yeah, and don't pretend that comparable software like Google Drive, Sharepoint or Dropbox is faster.
I compare it to a samba or (s)ftp share. I wish it was similar in speed and ease of use.
It's become better since I migrated over to PostgreSQL. But it's still not great.
Why would you compare to something so utterly different?
I'd argue that the primary function of Nextcloud is to serve files. Of course the other services lack other stuff, which is why I'm still using Nextcloud. But I still wish its performance was similar to pure file servers.
I think the file server analogy isn't really fair. Nextcloud is better compared to Microsoft 365 or Google GSuite.
All of these offer file storage, but also much more.
Sure. But serving files is the core functionality of Nextcloud. You can remove every other functionality. But the files app cannot be removed.
I agree. They're suffering from feature creep I fear
I disagree. The extras and modularity are the core functionality. If you're just serving files, there's SFTP, WebDAV, etc.
PostgreSQL is definitely a boost to performance, especially if you offload the DB to a dedicated server (depending on load, can even be a cluster)
Nevertheless, it probably has much to do with how it's deployed and how many proxies are in front of it, and/or VPN. If you have large numbers of containers and small CPU/low memory hardware, and either running everything on one machine or have some other limitations, it'll be slow.
Admittedly, I'm not very familiar with the codebase, but I feel Apache isn't improving the speed either. Not exactly sure how PHP is nowadays with concurrency and async, but generally a microservice type architecture is nice because you can add more workers/instances wherever a bottleneck emerges.
Apache is plenty fast enough for self-hosting scenarios.
My install is basically instant. Might be your connection?
Dropbox is A LOT faster than NC ever was. But if you want to talk about speeds and reliability then use Synching. Add FileBrowser if you want to have a WebUI on a central “server” to access all your files and you’ll be 100x better than the garbage that NC offers.