Similar to many commenters here, I
really want to love nextcloud. It was the very first thing I installed when I built my homelab and it's still running years later. However.
I just plain can't use the thing. The only thing that works well is automatically uploading new photos from my phone. That's it, that's the only thing.
My server is old, yes, but we're still talking about dual 8c/16t Xeons, 128GB RAM, and a 7-disk striped RAID storage. It's no slouch.
I can connect to it with a bleeding edge gaming computer with the latest i9 16 core whatever and a fancy GPU with any browser direct over gigabit Ethernet and it still, somehow, takes a full thirty seconds to show the login page. Clicking on anything in the browser is at minimum a 15 second delay. Trying to browse files takes a good 30 seconds just to switch views to the new folder and another 30-60 to render a plain text list of files. Browsing photos is only slightly slower. I get the exact same level of performance when my client is an ancient first generation i3. It's astonishing, really.
I've debugged this far beyond my abilities and the best I've been able to determine is that the browser is spending most of its time just waiting for the server to respond. The server shows no interesting trends in CPU usage, so I have no clue. I can only assume it's attempting to render server-side on a single thread. Given the poor single thread performance on the Xeon this seems fairly plausible.
But regardless, this is by far the single worst performing website I've ever seen anywhere, ever. We've all seen horrendous single-word-per-page scroll-scroll-scroll slideshow websites that take ages to load. Nextcloud makes those sites look like bare HTML GeoCities pages.
It's atrocious, unacceptable, and unusable. There's no excuse for this.
And yes, I'm using the AIO docker image. I've also tried bare metal installs with the same performance. I've tried a more modern i5 machine. I've eliminated any problems that could be on my part and I'm left with the conclusion that nextcloud is just inexcusably bad.
Which is a damn shame because this is everything I want from self-hosting. I'd love to get my family onto this. Have a central place to share photos and files. Keep everyone's devices backed up in a place I know is safe and secure. But I wouldn't inflict this thing on my worst enemy.
This all sounds like hyperbole, but it truly is the worst of the worst. I have never, since the invention of the internet, seen a website this bad.
Edit: oh and also all of the desktop clients are barely-working garbage. The UX feels like it was designed by aliens who heard about human interfaces in a Chinese-room scenario. Utterly absurd nonstandard unintuitive garbage. The android client isn't much better and the iPhone client is famously broken on purpose.