Hey there!
I just wanted to share a bit about my experience as a hobbyist and self-hosting enthusiast. While I may not be the most educated on the topic, I’ve been able to self-host my favorite services to avoid relying on big companies like Google and Amazon.
A few years ago, I started my self-hosting journey with Nextcloud, and it completely blew my mind. Finally, I didn’t have to rely on Google Drive anymore!
However, I quickly realized that using a Raspberry Pi made things a bit sluggish. I tried upgrading to a more powerful machine. Still slow. I then tried with an i5-4460, but it was still slow and buggy. I even tried an i3-10100, and it was still a bit of a pain to use. It seems like many others feel the same frustration, so I know I’m not alone. I often wonder how some other people claim they have no issues with Nextcloud, but hey, good for them!
Because of the tinkering it seems to need, I feel like I don’t have enough time and knowledge to make Nextcloud work as smoothly as I’d like, which defeats the purpose of self-hosting it.
That’s why I’ve been exploring other options. I gave Seafile a shot, but couldn’t figure out how to solve a “CSRF verification failed” error. Projectsend and Xbackbone are great, but they don’t quite match what I’m looking for. I also tried Cloudreve, but I wasn’t a fan of its sorting philosophy. I did find Picoshare, which I stuck with, but for a totally different purpose.
Then, I tried ownCloud for the first time. Wow, it was fast! Uploading an 8GB folder took just 3 minutes compared to the 25 minutes it took with Nextcloud. Plus, everything was lightning quick on the same machine. I really loved using it. Unfortunately, there’s currently a vulnerability affecting it, which led me to uninstall it.
I also gave OCIS a try, and it felt even faster. The interface was smooth and fluid, it was truly impressive. However, with the recent news of it becoming part of Kiteworks, I’m a bit unsure about its future.
I can’t help but wonder why so many people have been raving about Nextcloud all these years when ownCloud performs so well right out of the box. I’d love to hear about your experience and the services you use. Share your thoughts!
I have been selfhosting Nextcloud now for five years (never tried selfhosting Owncloud). And you are right with the performance observation (I never managed higher upload speeds than 30 MB/second), the key difference is the application support.
One thing that bothered me for years is how to find photos you took a while ago. While Google and Apple offer smart features, with my selfhosted setup I was always depending on the date as only way to find photos.
The memories app for Nextcloud is a real game changer. Let me show you some of the features.
📸 Timeline: Sort photos and videos by date taken, parsed from Exif data. ⏪ Rewind: Jump to any time in the past instantly and relive your memories. 🤖 AI Tagging: Group photos by people and objects, powered by recognize and facerecognition. 🖼️ Albums: Create albums to group photos and videos together. Then share these albums with others. 🗺️ Map: View your photos on a map, tagged with accurate reverse geocoding.
There are many more apps, from simple tools to complete office environments. For me, this is the reason why I will continue using Nextcloud for the foreseeable future.
I found the application support to be a great plus when I started using Nextcloud. Then, maybe only psychologically, it felt like bloat slowing down my setup soI started hosting standalone solutions instead.
I totally get your enthusiasm about memories. But while I’m a photographer and have my own way of sorting stuff, I find photoprism or immich more attractive and convenient solutions.
Did you install Nextcloud with a redis instance for caching?
I don’t remember, probably not. I skipped most of the optional addons like phpmemcache.
I use the docker compose file with apache, mariadb, and redis, and it is still a bit slow even on a DIY NAS with a Ryzen 5600G.
I’m using seafile, and you just gave me flashbacks to the CSRF nonsense. Dont remember how i fixed it unfortunately.
I dont understand why nextcloud is so slow. I tried it out recently and its just so slow to upload files. Good to know owncloud is better, but might wait a little while before I try that out again.
Installed it a few weeks ago, no CSRF problems to report. And the sync client is finally Apple Silicon native.
you just gave me flashbacks to the CSRF nonsense.
Hehe, report back if you remember something ;)
See post 3 here:
https://forum.seafile.com/t/seafile-docker-403-csrf-error-after-logon/17474/2
Several things to try here
Thank you for looking that up :) I already read every post on the subject my search engine returned.
But you know what ? I tried again, calmly and taking my time and now it works. So thank you for putting me back on the right track :D
I dont understand why nextcloud is so slow. I tried it out recently and its just so slow to upload files.
Because nobody on that team knows how to design and code software.
Nextcloud is very quick IF you don’t mind applying extensive PHP and web server optimizations. This takes time and may have to be redone after upgrades depending on what changes. This is why I don’t really recommend it to those just looking to self host a simple file server.
IF you don’t mind applying extensive PHP and web server optimizations
Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m struggling with here. It’s a bit counterintuitive for newcomers and not really friendly for beginners.
I’m just wondering, what is your process for those optimizations? Did you happen to follow any specific documentation or resources?
The two main sources I used for initial setup was the nextcloud tuning guide and Carsten Rieger’s guides which are always changing, here is the current one (in German but easy to translate).
Thank you !
I messed that up soooo many times it’s not funny. I eventually gave up after spending two weekends on setup and just went with vultr and a turnkey solution.
Even then it’s probably still slower than everything else is out of the box.
AMD Ryzen 7 5700X + 32 GB of RAM: https://lemmy.world/comment/346174
Just no. What do you consider “applying extensive PHP and web server optimizations” tho? Even allowing PHP to use 10GB of RAM and infinite input time doesn’t get the job done.
That might tell us more about how badly your php process manager and/or db connection handler is set up, seriously. I run nextcloud “natively” (no docker, no nonsense) on hardware that was modest 15y ago (Intel Atom/2GB RAM), and it’s pretty good.
That might tell us more about how badly your php process manager and/or db connection handler is set up, seriously. I run nextcloud “natively”
Yeah sure. I’m not the only complaining as you can read on this post and I’ve tried it in multiple ways, multiple configurations from the defaults to the absurd abnormalities like the one you commended and it doesn’t make much difference. Unfortunately NextCloud is garbage, get over it.
Also your comment tells me that you’re full of shit, because you’re implying that both a generic Docker setup and mines are all shit. You can’t have it both ways. What are you suggesting? That the NC guys made a bad job out in their Docker images?
n hardware that was modest 15y ago (Intel Atom/2GB RAM), and it’s pretty good.
How many users? How much data?
Btw do you use the webmail at all or are you about to tell me that these screenshots are hallucinations?
Yeah sure. I’m not the only complaining as you can read on this post
I’m not saying that you are the only one complaining, but from what I can tell, most people in your situation are deploying their instance from “cookie-cutter” docker images. In practice, it often means that the same machine end-up hosting multiple web servers, database servers, application servers, etc etc. And those servers are developed around heavily-optimized event loops that assume direct access to the full server resources. So if you want predictable and good performance, there’s no way around tweaking some knobs and be very mindful of how each and every service is deployed alongside the next one. And of course, you can’t trust someone else to know better than yourself what’s running in your box (not even the nextcloud developers) and which service should get preference over what under heavy load.
Nextcloud has that against itself that it uses advanced php features and large objects that need to be cached at different layers. That makes it a slightly more complex app than your go-to php CRM, but it’s not unheard of either (you’d be at the same spot hosting a large mediawiki or wordpress).
Does that make it garbage? Well, you are entitled to your own opinion, of course.
Also your comment tells me that you’re full of shit, because you’re implying that both a generic Docker setup and mines are all shit. You can’t have it both ways. What are you suggesting? That the NC guys made a bad job out in their Docker images?
Do I deserve the insult? I answered the docker part, though. In general, I’d say that you are better-off not using docker in PROD , unless you have the time and energy to spend rebuilding images to make them fit your pre-existing deployment (what nobody does), and then invest the time in fine-tuning through multiple containers (which very much goes against the “fire and forget” mindset of most docker users).
How many users? How much data?
About a dozen, 2TB, upwards 700k files
Btw do you use the webmail at all or are you about to tell me that these screenshots are hallucinations?
I’m definitely not using the webmail. If you have performance issues, you should rather start with just the “core” (i.e. files) and add on incrementally.
And again, I’m not saying that nextcloud doesn’t deserve being optimized, or somehow be made more foolprof. I too went through a phase of “that can’t be real, this cannot be that slow” and walked my way out of it.
Nextcloud has that against itself that it uses advanced php features and large objects that need to be cached at different layers. That makes it a slightly more complex app than your go-to php CRM, but it’s not unheard of either (you’d be at the same spot hosting a large mediawiki or wordpress).
The thing is that I have experience with other complex or high usage PHP applications and I know how to optimize things. What I see in NC is poorly structured code, warnings and erros thrown around left and right. The OP also said that ownCloud gave him a much better experience out of the box, and that’s still a “complex” PHP application.
It doesn’t make sense some stuff like this to happen:
NC webmail is unusable. We have to pretend it doesn’t exist. Even with a completely empty IMAP server it takes 30 seconds to load. I don’t know how it can be slow like that, they cache every single message in the database. Roundcube is 1000x faster and has no cache at all. Can’t they just peek the source code? https://lemmy.world/comment/5747030
Or the screenshots I showed before.
The thing is that I have experience with other complex or high usage PHP applications and I know how to optimize things. What I see in NC is poorly structured code, warnings and erros thrown around left and right.
Well, on my instance, logs are pretty quiet and I am not a PHP developer to form an opinion on the overall architecture. But if you take the time to write down what you feel is wrong with the nextcloud codebase, I’m pretty sure many people (and me first) will read it with interest and perhaps even do something about it (typically the kind of “HN frontpage” content, if it’s well written).
The OP also said that ownCloud gave him a much better experience out of the box, and that’s still a “complex” PHP application.
Last I heard of ownCloud, people were saying that it had been rewritten in go or something similar. Funny bit of history, nextcloud forked off of owncloud, got a ton of mindshare in the early days, and quickly became the better/faster of the two (perf was one compelling reason for me to migrate back then). I wouldn’t mind NC following suit (in the end, we benefit from this type of competition).
NC webmail is unusable
I don’t plan on ever using it, but thanks for the heads-up. That said, if you feel that roundcube performs better, it happens that someone has packaged it for NC, so you should be able to use that instead of the troublemaking client.
Last I heard of ownCloud, people were saying that it had been rewritten in go or something similar. Funny bit of history, nextcloud forked off of owncloud,
The Go rewrite is another version, not what the OP is using.
, it happens that someone has packaged it for NC, so you should be able to use that instead of the troublemaking client.
That doesn’t make it all good, you lose the integration with other NC features.
Syncthing. Once you set it up, there is almost no going back. It doesn’t pass through servers though so your backup machine also needs to be on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syncthing
Of course, Syncthing is a fantastic tool, but it’s important to note that it serves a different purpose compared to platforms like NC or OC. What I’m really in need of is a collaborative cloud system that allows me to easily work together with other people :)
Okay yeah, then you’re absolutely right.
You actually forget it’s even running. Example: Me. I forgot i had this installed.
Yup. I can’t live without it now. The only thing I had to change is to remember to open my work laptop before I leave for the day so that it syncs. About one a week I do a backup with my NAS at home
I’ve been using Nextcloud for years and it has never performed well but I always put that down to my disks being slow.
It has gotten quicker over time, but not hugely.
I rarely use the web interface, I just use the mobile app to sync photos from my phone then everything on my network runs over NFS. It even that was a pain to get working with permissions with NC.
Now I want to try OC. I think the reason I went with NC was because it was meant to be the new and better developed OC after a bunch of OC devs left to form NC.
If you try oc out, please, report back. I’m interested in reading your opinion.
Nextcloud AIO (all in one) is a docker compose nextcloud instance that handles all of the optimizations for you. That’s what I use. I host it on a VPS I lease from contabo. Nextcloud is fast enough for me. I don’t need lightning speeds.
I remember trying it but it still felt sluggish. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling and it just kept failing and I didn’t want to wipe anything just for Nextcloud.
AIO is nice if you have a pretty well dedicated box it seems. For me, I’ve got a pile of services, split horizon DNS, and reverse proxies that made the domain check and talk modules a pain to set up with a lot of NAT/hairpins coming into play. If you’re pointing straight to the box locally though it’s a great way to get all the more complicated stuff patched in.
I sit it behind a traefik reverse proxy, I have a few other services running too, no issues.
In my case the proxy isn’t on the same box and ended up with the traffic coming out of the host to the proxy and then back from the proxy to the host, so effectively the host was both the source and the destination of the proxied traffic when it did that domain check. Similar issues for the turn server part. It was technically workable, but not particularly pretty so I ended up just doing a simple manual setup.
Or not… https://lemmy.world/comment/346174
The AIO is equally a crappy solution that doesn’t work properly, like everything else in NC.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System IMAP Internet Message Access Protocol for email NAS Network-Attached Storage NAT Network Address Translation RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
6 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 12 acronyms.
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Can someone disable this bullshit and useless bots that fill posts with garbage? Thanks.
Just block it.
Asking others to do the thing you can do.
I wasn’t aware I could block it, better question is, why do we have a bot expanding terms like “NAS” that everyone on lemmy knows what they’re? This introduces more spam into conversations than needed.
I don’t think that’s a better question. I’d just say ‘not everyone understamds the things I do, and someone might find that useful. But it’s useless noise to me, so I’ll filter it out (in this case by blocking it).’ Conveniently there’s a tool for just that.
The point to consider addressing it differently is when the bot owners pull some shit like creating new accounts to circumvent blocks. that would be an issue. How to address that, if it occurs, is a better question.
the problem at least for me it’s the plugins. I need news, tasks, calendar, snappymail, music, cospend, deck, forms, onlyoffice, cookbook, gpodder sync, notes and something else. OCIS is faster but i don’t need just a simple drive…
I also need those services, but I find them more responsive with standalone solutions such as Vikunja, Radicale, Navidrome, IHateMoney and so on ;) My issue is that I badly need a fast and reliable drive for work.
and it was still a bit of a pain to use. It seems like many others feel the same frustration, so I know I’m not alone. I often wonder how some other people claim they have no issues with Nextcloud, but hey, good for them!
That has been my experience, even on high end hardware. It just doesn’t get better, NextCloud is a joke full of bugs and issues and it won’t get anywhere unless the people running the project decide to actually do thing properly instead of going with the “next cool thing” at every opportunity.
Here is a test I did with a AMD Ryzen 7 5700X + 32 GB of RAM: https://lemmy.world/comment/346174
I spent weeks researching and trying to tweak things and at the end of the day NC always performs poorly. Most of the issues seem to be related to the poorly implemente WebUI but the desktop app also has issues with large folders. Also tried the docker version, the “all in one” similar results it simply doesn’t cut it.
My experience with NC’s Webmail: https://lemmy.world/comment/5490189
I can’t help but wonder why so many people have been raving about Nextcloud all these years when ownCloud performs so well right out of the box. I’d love to hear about your experience and the services you use. Share your thoughts!
I believe the people who say they don’t have issues with it aren’t just using it, after all you can’t refute screenshots like the ones on the last link. This kinda looks a lot like the Linux Desktop Delusion, people say it can be everything to everyone and that things are just great while it fails at the most basic tasks a regular user might attempt. Since we’re on the delusional land let me link to this about LibreOffice with pictures being considered “good enough for most paperwork with good MS-Office compatibility”.
NC webmail is unusable. We have to pretend it doesn’t exist. Even with a completely empty IMAP server it takes 30 seconds to load. I don’t know how it can be slow like that, they cache every single message in the database. Roundcube is 1000x faster and has no cache at all. Can’t they just peek the source code?
I don’t know how they even have it as a feature. Right now NC webmail it’s not a beta, it’s not alpha, , it’s a proof of concept.
Like nextcloud maps. In their blog they wrote a post over one year ago describing it as the next big thing after sliced bread. You install it and that’s it, you see a map of the world with no feature. Every single thing described in that post is something that could potentially do if some developer does some integration. Why writing the post then? Wait three, four, five years and post it when it’s ready.
Look https://nextcloud.com/it/blog/plan-your-next-trip-with-nextcloud-maps-new-features/
NC webmail is unusable. We have to pretend it doesn’t exist. Even with a completely empty IMAP server it takes 30 seconds to load
Did you ever try the single sign-on option that allows users to login to NextCloud using their IMAP credentials? After spending some time with it you’ll find it to be yet another half broken feature: https://github.com/nextcloud/mail/issues/2698 (see my reply bellow).
Roundcube is 1000x faster and has no cache at all. Can’t they just peek the source code?
Roundcube Open-Source Webmail Software Merges With Nextcloud … So, what should we expect now? To have RC as NextCloud’s default e-mail interface OR to get RC filled with mindless bugs and crappy features/decisions? Most likely the latter as NC’s “management” is what it is.
My second question about this merge is what is gonna happen with the Kolab guys (https://kolab.org / https://kolabnow.com) as they’ve been the ones actually “paying the bill” and investing serious development time into RoundCube and into useful plugins such as CardDAV and CalDAV that are actually better than anything NextCloud has done to this day. Their funding comes from their e-mail hosting service that is somehow in competition with NextCloud. Around 2006 Kolab also raised more than $100k USD to develop RoundCube so… that’s the kind of investment they’ve been working under.
Like nextcloud maps. In their blog they wrote a post over one year ago describing it as the next big thing after sliced bread.
Another joke by NextCloud.
Wow, you did spend quite some time trying to make it properly work.
As someone that looks to be educated on the subject, what did you end up using as a replacement to NC ?
@Tiritibambix@lemmy.ml read the last part of my comment here. :)
In short, a mix of Dovecot, Postfix, Syncthing, FileBrowser, WebDAV, Baikal, RoundCube (with Kolab plugins) and deployments to machines via Ansible. I also plan to integrate ejabberd, converse.js or Jitsi as a chat/call solution as soon as I have the time.
Then, I tried ownCloud for the first time. Wow, it was fast! Uploading an 8GB folder took just 3 minutes compared to the 25 minutes it took with Nextcloud. Plus, everything was lightning quick on the same machine. I really loved using it. Unfortunately, there’s currently a vulnerability affecting it, which led me to uninstall it.
I have no idea on how you access your self-hosted services but wireguard could help you out to access all your service from all your devices, with less security risks and only one point of failure (the wireguard port). Also this takes away most of the vulnerabilities you could be exposed to, because you access all your home services through a secure tunnel without directly exposing the api ports on your router !
I personally run all my services with docker-compose + traefik + self signed CA certificats + adguardhome dns rewrite. And access all my services through https://service.home.lab on all my devices ! It took me some time to set everything up nicely but right now I’m pretty happy how everything works !
About the current ownCloud vulnerability, they already took some measure and the new docker image has the phpinfo fix (uhhg). Also while I wouldn’t take their word for granted:
"The importance of ownCloud’s open source in the enterprise and public-sector markets is embraced by both organizations.”
I use a wireguard tunnel ;) Thank you for the updates on the vulnerability and from Kiteworks :)
In my experience the performance issue with NC is the default docker container. Bare metal + the aio or a slightly tuned stack for NC performs reliably and snappy enough for it to be usable.
I sidestepped all this crap by buying Synology in 2014 and upgrading 2 years ago. Sure, it isn’t FOSS, but it is very nearly plug and play.
I configured OpenVPN for when I want to use it remotely, and self host my music, video, and family photos.
Having the 4 drive RAID-6 gives me some security from the danger of losing data between backups.
I store all my scanned documents, ocr’d, and keep the paper under control.
Synology was an option at some point in my journey, but yeah, I’m a FOSS enthusiast :)
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