Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a Pi4, 4gb model running my NextCloud instance in a docket container, along with pihole and home assistant in another folder. It’s always run perfectly fine for me and my needs, and I even tested having shared video calling in NextCloud and it continued to work great. I’m not sure your configuration, but it might be worth trying on a Pi4?
I was using the pi4 with 4gb ram. Were you booting of an sd card? That might have been my issue.
I do treat it like I would a Dropbox. I store photos I want to save, documents I want to save, etc. I was using it for recording trips for a brief bit, as well.
I’ve used it to share pictures with friends from our hikes, and I’m on a very fast internet connection.
My usage loads might be sufficiently low to not be a problem. I’m not constantly streaming from it like LTT does their NAS. For major software projects, I might use it as a remote git repo.
I probably have a high speed SD card.
There are times when it’s slow, but not too often. I forget what I’ve done to resolve that.
Also, running the NextCloud app on my computer has never been slow and that’s my normal use case for file management on it.