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
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
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
Likely because it’s mainly written in PHP and the default database is SQLite, which is not great for large deployments.
But I use Nextcloud daily on a low end machine and I don’t think it’s that bad.
SQLite sure but I doubt PHP has any negative impact.
PHP for sure can have a negative effect depending on how they are handling their data access through.
The application code itself running on PHP probably isn’t a problem but the influence that PHP may have over your data access patterns can be a source of significant performance problems.
but the influence that PHP may have over your data access patterns can be a source of significant performance problems.
Let me rephrase that for you: the influence that poorly written PHP code, an utter and total disregard for good software development practices and the general ineptitude shown by the NC developers have over your data access patterns is the source of significant performance problems. We also have to consider all the client side issues, poor decisions and a general lack of any testing.
Fixed :)
Likely because it’s mainly written in PHP and the default database is SQLite
Maybe the issue isn’t the technologies but rather the complete and utter ineptitude of NC’s developers and bullshit decisions their business team makes. Every tool is a great tool if you know how to use it properly.
Idk man, runs great on my Proxmox machine
I assume it’s just not built to be fast, because it’s still slow even with MySQL, Redis, high PHP memory limits, a fast CPU and NVMe storage, and so on.
Last time I tested it I had a load time of 1-2 seconds just to bring up the files interface, it feels laggy no matter what. And syncing a folder with ~50k files and 40GB or so in size takes a very long time compared to Syncthing or just syncing over SMB.
Maybe use Postges? I’m using it with MariaDB and Redis and its pretty fast.
Use redis and it will feel smoother.
Yep. When I first set up my instance, I couldn’t believe how slow it was. I set up redis using the Nextcloud documentation and its like butter now.
Nextcloud is slow and clunky if you run it on a banana.
Run it on a “normal” server and everything is smooth.
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 faster.
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.
I tried running nextcloud on an allwinner RiscV chip and it was dead slow lol
In fairness anything is slow on lower end hardware. The tradeoff is that it is very power efficient
Run it on a “normal” server and everything is smooth.
Sure until you try with a high end 12 core CPU on NVMe storage all kinds of caching, redis etc. and you find you it doesn’t perform particularly better.
I’m no hardware person but I don’t have redis or caching enabled and it works fine
It runs fine in a VM with a few cores, 4gb of ram and Sata SSDs
The entire Nextcloud folder is on a network share as well.
Im running it on celeron g3930 and its great. I did remove most extensions (this was the trick I believe) and using MySQL. I have only 2 users tho
I keep trying it every couple of years to see if it works better, but nah. Even with MySQL/PG + Redis, it’s still slow and clunky. Maybe in 2026
Its not slow and clunky for me
If you want fast file sync between computers, use syncthing
* fast and reliable. 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.
Because SQLite is slow as balls. Use MariaDB and redis:
https://markontech.com/posts/setup-nextcloud-with-redis-using-docker/
PostgreSQL makes it faster still.
Is there a migration guide?
Yes, should be easy to find. Nextcloud has a tool for that.
What I dont get is why so many years later, their android app still won’t auto sync
You need to configure it
Nothing to configure…you specify folders, but they won’t auto upload or download
Because that is not its intended function. If you want that just use Easy Sync with Nextcloud or another WebDAV server.
Your both crazy. My shit syncs just fine.
Android actually pushes to folders on server without manually initiating?
Settings -> auto upload. Set your options and folder mapping to the cloud. If you want it to work all the time turn off battery optimization of the next cloud app. It’s been working for myself and my wife since at least 2018.
Does it auto download then too? I swear I looked all through that app. Couldn’t get KeePass or obsidian to sync automatically
I used to do keepass through it. So yes. But I haven’t done that in a hot minute. I do still have a master sync folder for some stuff… but I have tried to open any of those items on my phone in a long time.
Last I checked it worked. I haven’t needed that in a long time though so that might have changed. But it’s not that hard to just grab the file in the nextcloud app too.
I like to update both and keep it all synced. What do you use now? I’m probably going to do syncthing
*you’re
I think they just didn’t set it up
*yer
… a wizard 'arry
I have been running nextcloud for some time, it was running very quickly. But the v28 update seems to have broke some of the extra apps, like groupfolders.
That said, it’s very much a system that needs good hardware to run it well
Yeah, it’s been broken since v27. I’m still on v26 because of this.
It has been slowly improving. It used to be a lot worse but I have a lot less issues with it now than I did before all the changes. Its not the fastest best way to do anything, there are better calendar, file sync, email etc etc applications out there in every category that run better but its also quite an easy way to make a lot of things happen.
Nextcloud is fine. Use the All-in-One master container, it’s faster than any other way I’ve installed it. I’ve tried every method from bare metal to docker to NextcloudPi and it’s the fastest and easiest to maintain.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters Git Popular version control system, primarily for code HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web NVMe Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage SSD Solid State Drive mass storage SSO Single Sign-On VPN Virtual Private Network nginx Popular HTTP server
6 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 4 acronyms.
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And maybe CPU, and also need some good old fine tuning
