What's wrong with Nextcloud, and why is it slow/clunky?

Otter@lemmy.ca to

Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 83 points – 4 months ago

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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It needs some tweaks to be snappy. The defaults are really bad.

change database from SQLite to a proper database like MySQL or Postgres, and configure the database server to use your memory fully
increase the PHP memory limit from the default (128M on many distros) to >1G, the more the better
install APCu in-memory cache for PHP
add Redis as additional cache
turn off the antivirus extension, if installed (ClamAV is useless)
use http/2 on Apache/nginx to increase performance with multiple connections

https://docbot.onetwoseven.one/services/nextcloud/

Thank you for these suggestions. But I have a few questions.

How can I do the 2nd and 3rd point if I am using docker/podman containers?

Why is ClamAV useless?

Not sure how to do that in docker, I’ve run mine as a plain old PHP-FPM site for years and years. It might be something that can be tweaked using config files or environment variables, or might require building a custom image.

ClamAV is slow and doesn’t catch the nastiest of malware. Its entire approach is stuck in 2008. It’s better than nothing for screening emails, but for a private file store it won’t help much considering that you’ll already have the files on your system somewhere. And most importantly, it slows down file uploads 10x and increases CPU load substantially. The only good reason to use ClamAV for nextcloud is if you will be sued if you don’t!

ClamAV is good for detecting simple threats. However, I hear it eats ram.

This has me curious, not to derail the topic, but I always hear that ClamAV is the best way to go for Linux. Is there a free solution that you would recommend in place of it?

I think the best solution is to use good internet hygiene

For the 2nd point, see https://docs.docker.com/config/containers/resource_constraints/#limit-a-containers-access-to-memory

It's in the config file. https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/configuration_server/config_sample_php_parameters.html

Out of curiosity, why isn't this stuff done by default?

MySQL is still pretty slow

it should work with mariaDB which is faster in my experience

You can do all of that and NC will still be the piece of shirt that is it is fail to sync stuff.

You are like the most miserable poster with so many axes to grind.

Relax man.

Or one of the few people who tested the thing and spend time taking screenshots and pointing out issues unlike most others...

Git gud.

I've never had such an experience in 2 years

Well I only saw problems with about 1TB of small files. I'm not sure if they were actually caused by the volume of the data or because there were multiple using syncing parts of that data as well.

My setup has no where near that much data. Maybe it gets bogged down with lots of IO.

I will say caching is really important for Nextcloud to be fast