I'd be curious to hear from anyone that uses Nextcloud and it's actually functional instead of being so slow that it is unusable. I've never had success getting it running
I've been running first Owncloud, then Nextloud since it became a thing. It mostly works as it should, file synchronisation from mobile devices to user accounts works as intended and since the Vue rewrite of the Files app the file-related UI is adequate, i.e. about as good as you can expect a web app to be. I use various other apps - News, Talk, Maps, Podcast sync, Memories, Notes - which also mostly work just fine. All in all Nextcloud is a good all-round platform which performs it tasks good enough while being easy to manage. There are better file sync apps, better RSS apps, better photo management apps, better communication apps, better mail apps... but hosting all those is a lot of work compared to hosting just Nextcloud with a bunch of apps.
Been running nextcloud on a raspberry pi 4 on prem for a very small business <5 users for about 3-4 years ish. It’s faster than most clouds because it’s local. I’ve had very little trouble with it. Don’t tend to use much the features apart from files sync though.
How did you set it up and how do you run it? What are the specs of the machine you run it on. I've tried setting it up a few times, because it looks exactly like a project I'd want to self host, but its just been unusable.
I used to run it on a 4 core Celeron NUC with a measly 8 gig of ram and 1 TB SSD via the community fpm container: https://github.com/nextcloud/docker I now run it on a much more powerful system but performance wise it's the same.
Side containers
DB: I use postgres
Redis: https://github.com/dragonflydb/dragonfly as the redis container
Image processing: imaginary container maintained by the Nextcloud team
Most of this is available in the AIO setup but I prefer manually tuning things for my system
As it's a __big__ SAS product to run it well on lower end systems you MUST:
- Tune your PHP settings to your system.
- Tune your DB settings
- Set up caching properly
- Offload as much processing as possible to background processes (e.g. preview generation)
Probably tune your Proxy settings as well.
Big changes I've made:
- Switch logging to error only and syslog (not the normal file on disk) as it can hammer single disk systems.
- Switch to unix sockets for redis and the database for quite a performance boost.
I’ve never done much in the way of tuning Nextcloud, but I do enable APCu and Redis. I also ditched MariaDB years ago and moved to PostgreSQL.
It definitely isn’t so slow it is unusable, limited to 2 cores of an Intel N95 CPU and 2GB RAM.
I have often wonder if some apps drag the whole thing down because my experience doesn’t seem to be universal. That dashboard thing had to go, and the talk app was never something I was interested in either.
I’ve been running it since it was OwnCloud and never really have upgrade issues either. YMMV.