So far my experience with Nextcloud has been that it is a pain in the arse to install, and once it’s installed is slow as anything. Literally couldn’t run it on my pi 3b, now got it up and running pretty nicely on a NUC but it’s still not great. Have caching set up.
I have the notes app installed on my android phone and I can never used rich text editing because it gives timeout error.
This shouldn’t be this complicated. All I want is to de-Google my documents and notes, and self-host my kanban. I don’t really need the rest though it’s nice to have the options.
Do people use alternatives? Am I doing something completely wrong? I set it up using nginx which I know is not supported, but the alternative using Docker AIO didn’t allow me to use custom port easily.
I seriously suggest you give Nextcloud another go, this time under Docker. Very simple to do.
Save the following in a new folder as docker-compose.yml
version: '3' volumes: db: services: nextcloud-app: image: nextcloud container_name: nextcloud-app restart: always volumes: - ./data:/var/www/html environment: - MYSQL_PASSWORD=changeme - MYSQL_DATABASE=nextcloud - MYSQL_USER=nextcloud - MYSQL_HOST=nextcloud-db ports: - "80:80" links: - nextcloud-db nextcloud-db: image: mariadb container_name: nextcloud-db restart: always command: --transaction-isolation=READ-COMMITTED --binlog-format=ROW volumes: - db:/var/lib/mysql environment: - MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=changeme - MYSQL_PASSWORD=changeme - MYSQL_DATABASE=nextcloud - MYSQL_USER=nextcloudrun this command in the folder -
docker-compose up -dopen http://localhost
Is the mariadb a default part of nextcloud? I’ve seen posts saying to use a separate db so things can be backed up easier, so I was wondering if that’s how you have it set up above.
No you can use other databases. It is separate here
In this setup the DB is not part of Nextcloud. Both are running in separate services aka containers, which can be administrated independently from each other.
I run Nextcloud, its responsive and has all my stuff in it. Notes, Calendar, Contacts, Kanboard, Photos, RSS reader, others. You do need look at the setup, how many PHP processes are you running, how much memory does MySQL use.
My current setup is a a PHP vm, 6 cores and 8GB of memory and a MySQL vm that is 2 cores and 8GB memory. But I work for a SaaS provider and thats now we carve up our systems, a vm/instance for 1 job.
how many PHP processes
Curious: where do I set this number?
The way I sorted it was to run nextcloud for a week, then run
ps auxon the host and see what the memory use of a php process is. The 5th column is the memory use of a process, divide the number into the amount of memory you want PHP to use. The number frompsis bytes, so you will need to use some maths to make it all fitin Debian running PHP-FPM in
/etc/php/{{ php_version }}/fpm/pool.d/www.confedit or add the below lines with the settings you needpm = dynamic pm.max_children = 8 pm.start_servers = 2 pm.min_spare_servers = 2 pm.max_spare_servers = 3Also MySQL has some options you can change to use more or less memory, this handy tool MySQLTuner is your best way to get the options
It runs quite nicely on my Pi 3 with Apache and no Docker. I only use cloud storage, but the rest seems to work fine if needed. Maybe switching to a supported configuration would help?
I dont know about kanban but the other stuff can be achieved via webdav. All major webservers can do that or you just use filebrowser.org (a selfhosted webdav server with built-in user management).
Wdym nginx is not supported? It very much is. Nextcloud is a pain to set up but after fiddling with settings for a day or two you can get it working smoothly. In my experience there are no good alternatives to it.
The documentation says it is not officially supported: https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/19/admin_manual/installation/nginx.html
My bad, thought you meant support as incompatibilities. Offical support doesn’t not matter much to you since you are not using an enterprise license.
For speed Seafile absolutely smokes Nextcloud.
If you create an account they’ll give a pro license (limited to 3 users) for free. Or you can stick with the always free community edition which works great too.
Go for the AllinOne (AIO) Installation! Had huge performance issues first (Nextcloudpi Docker & normal Nextcloud Docker) and none with the current install.
You get a self servicing (updates/installation/etc.) docker install with backups and administration portal.
From the instructions it looked like anything other than the default ports is not supported in AIO. I want to host other sites on this server without much complication.
So use a reverse proxy like Nginx Proxy Manager
Yes, a reverse proxy can fix this issue.
I suspect nextcloud having performance issues with slow Disk IO. With rootless containers I had a much worse performance than rootfull. Also using MySQL Backend instead of SQLite did speedup the performance.
Nevertheless I have the same problems with nextcloud as you stated. Pretty much not as usable as I thought.
It’s on a SATA drive, albeit hard drive not ssd and I’m using mariadb. Everybody seems to suggest I need a beefier server but as a developer myself, the functionality of the software doesn’t seem to warrant anything more powerful.
Try moving the database at least on a SSD, and enable Redis caching.
Software config optimizations help a little bit but my biggest improvement was moving the DB to SSD. Spinning disks are great for capacity but not for DB performance. Random I/O is a big factor for them and those drives drop in performance so fast for that type of I/O due to physically spinning media.
I started out using Owncloud and later switched to Nextcloud once that fork was stable. For all my uses it has always needed beefy hardware to run well but I definitely have way more junk files in synced folders than I should & rarely clean things up.
How much memory? I think nextcloud wants around 8gb to run happily (ymmv). I’ve tried it with smaller sizes and ran into issues.
I think nextcloud wants around 8gb to run happily (ymmv).
As a developer myself, where did it go wrong?
I’m not sure it’s going “wrong”. It depends on the scenarios it’s designed for. If they intend it to be run on servers (there is no class of raspberry pi that is a server) then you design it to take advantage of those resources.
But it’s designed for selfhosting and consumes all that without doing much.
I didn’t mean to imply it needed server hardware. You can absolutely self-host Nextcloud. But RPIs are the absolutely lowest-end of hardware for serving duties. They’re great little systems but they’re designed to be cheap, not performant.
I self-host currently on a VM running on a 12 year old x86 system with 8GB RAM and with the Nextcloud file storage going over a 1Gbps NFS mount. Not exactly a high-end setup. And it performs just fine. I was previously running on a AWS EC2 instance where I noticed occasional issues running on a T4g.SMALL. (only 2GB RAM). I had to bump up to a MEDIUM at some point though.
It worked with less RAM pretty fine for a long time. But as I increased usage it would have issues occasionally. I think with all the images I have it was doing lots of processing for thumbnails and the like. I never really dove into it to see what exactly was going on though…
But still - a moderately old desktop system with 4-8G of RAM is just fine for “self-hosting”.
EDIT: I should add - I’m also hosting MariaDB on the same server - also with its data stored on an NFS share.
I’m my experience, nextcloud is quite I/O bound. The performance of your storage device will greatly affect nextcloud performance. But if you’re already using SSD and the performance still bad, maybe there are other issues with your setup.
For me, speed isn’t the only issue. Everything about nc seems to be cobbled together in the most inconvenient way possible. Updates have always been hit or miss for me - and if you choose to use dockerized versions, you might as well shoot yourself, everything is very slow, even as the only use having it running on a quite capable machine it feels sluggish (not slow, but uncomfortably delayed).
It’s a glorified Dropbox clone, why do I need anything more than a rpi1 for that?
Nginx is supported and a good choice. What database are you using? I’d recommend MariaDB.
Nginx alone will not speed up Nextcloud. Use Postgres instead of MySQL and configure Redis and PHP Cache. This will speed up most. And Nginx is not officially support, see here
The documentation says nginx is not officially supported: https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/19/admin_manual/installation/nginx.html
I am using mariadb
Ah right, sorry; the company doesn’t support it directly but the docs provide an example. To me as tinkerer that was solid enough 😂😅
For Kanban I use wekan, because it has more features. Nextcloud I host using snap, which I cannot 100% recommend because it sometimes has troubles upgrading to the latest version. Still, for me it causes less trouble than a manual install.
Nextcloud is hard to install in manual way (even sometimes with Docker). As far I know, both Snap and Yunohost versions of Nextcloud are solid. I used Snap version on the cheapest Linode VPS, and it worked fine, especially when I doubled the SWAP to 1 GB. Now I use Yunohost version and I have only good time with it. It is super stable, fast and reliable. I used Nextcloud_ynh on HP 800 Mini G3 with i5-6500t and now on Asrock Mini PC with Ryzen 7 5700g. It is working just great.
If you don’t want to use Nextcloud, you ca install Vikunja for kanban and tasks. For notes Hedgedoc can be great.
+1 for Yunohost. I’ve never yet been able to figure out docker. Yunohost has kept me happy for years.
Pydio and Seafile are alternatives I’ve tried. Pydio was pretty fast too. I agree with you on Nextcloud, I want to like it but I inevitably start having issues and it’s slow even after tuning. It just tries to do too much and shouldn’t be that complex to spin up a file server.
To be honest I’m not interested in the file sharing side of nextcloud as I use Syncthing, I’m more interested in the utilities (eg notes, kanban) and the office capabilities. I want to replace gsuite
I have had issues with nextcloud breaking randomly every time ive tried it. The thing I wanted the most was the caldav/webdav to integrate with Gnome and Davx5 (and finally kill google calender), and to get that I tried Owncloud instead. The UI leaves a lot to be desired but if you only use the *dav functionality it works like a charm. It also has a mobile app for syncing and several extensions but I havent delved into them.
If you only need cardav/caldav functionality, Radicale provides just that. Can be deployed as a container and works flawlessly with DAVx5.
I am actually in a clinch with my nextcloud experience and found some different ways to handle this. My plans (tests looks good) is to simply use a small free nextcloud provider just to handle caldav/carddav/notes and stuff without all my data. Just enough to get everything synced.
For my data I plan to use ocis. It’s a long year rewrite of owncloud getting rid of PHP and hassle. It’s just a single binary. Docker support, too, but it needs some extra steps to initiate, unfortunately. But the experience is fast, modern, clean and simple. Without to much bloat.
