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Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

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Re: Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

#61

Post by bogwog »

Nextcloud is bloated and slow, but it works and is reliable. I've been running a small instance in a business setting with around 8 daily users for many years. It is rock solid and requires zero maintenance.

But people rarely use the web apps. Instead, it's used more like a NAS with the desktop sync client being the primary interface. Nobody likes the web apps because they're slow. The Windows desktop sync client has a really annoying update process, but other than that is excellent.

I could replace it with a traditional NAS, but the main feature keeping me there is an IMAP authentication plugin. This allows users to sign in with their business email/password. It works so well and makes it so much easier to manage user accounts, revoke access, do password resets, etc.

Re: Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

#62

Post by nucleardog »

Larrikin wrote: post #39
palata wrote: post #27

I would love to like Nextcloud, it's pretty great that it does exist. Just that makes it better than... well everything else I haven't found. What frustrates me is that it looks like it works, but once in a while it breaks in a way that is pretty much irreparable (or at least not in a practical way). I want to run an iOS/Android app that backs up images on my server. I tried the iOS app and when it works, it's cool.…

For your specific use case of photos, Immich is the front runner and a much better experience. Sadly for the general Dropbox replacement I haven't found anything either.

> Sadly for the general Dropbox replacement I haven't found anything either.

I had really good luck with Seafile[0]. It's not a full groupware solution, just primarily a really good file syncing/Dropbox solution.

Upsides are everything worked reliably for me, it was much faster, does chunk-level deduplication and some other things, has native apps for everything, is supported by rclone, has a fuse mount option, supports mounting as a "virtual drive" on Windows, supports publicly sharing files, shared "drives", end-to-end encryption, and practically everything else I'd want out of "file syncing solution".

The only thing I didn't like about it is that it stores all of your data as, essentially, opaque chunks on disk that are pieced together using the data in the database. This is how it achieves the performance, deduplication, and other things I _liked_. However it made me a little nervous that I would have a tough time extracting my data if anything went horribly wrong. I took backups. Nothing ever went horribly wrong over 4 or 5 years of running it. I only stopped because I shelved a lot of my self-hosting for a bit.

[0]: https://www.seafile.com/en/home/

Re: Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

#63

Post by nullgeo »

bastawhiz wrote: post #28
esafak wrote: post #22

Does anyone know what they are doing wrong to create such large bundles? What is the lesson here?

Not paying attention. 1. Indiscriminate use of packages when a few lines of code would do. 2. Loading everything on every page. 3. Poor bundling strategy, if any. 4. No minification step. 5. Polyfilling for long dead, obsolete browsers 6. Having multiple libraries that accomplish the same thing 7. Using tools and then not doing any optimization at all (like using React and not enabling React Runtime) Arguably things…

What is React runtime? I looked it up and the closest thing I came across is the newly announced React compiler. I have a vested interest in this because currently working on a micro-SaaS that uses React heavily and still suffering bundle bloat even after performing all the usual optimizations.

Re: Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

#64

Post by 63stack »

Larrikin wrote: post #39
palata wrote: post #27

I would love to like Nextcloud, it's pretty great that it does exist. Just that makes it better than... well everything else I haven't found. What frustrates me is that it looks like it works, but once in a while it breaks in a way that is pretty much irreparable (or at least not in a practical way). I want to run an iOS/Android app that backs up images on my server. I tried the iOS app and when it works, it's cool.…

For your specific use case of photos, Immich is the front runner and a much better experience. Sadly for the general Dropbox replacement I haven't found anything either.

Look into syncthing for a dropbox replacement, have been using it for years, very satisfied.

Re: Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

#65

Post by Semaphor »

nucleardog wrote: post #62
Larrikin wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For your specific use case of photos, Immich is the front runner and a much better experience. Sadly for the general Dropbox replacement I haven't found anything either.

> Sadly for the general Dropbox replacement I haven't found anything either. I had really good luck with Seafile[0]. It's not a full groupware solution, just primarily a really good file syncing/Dropbox solution. Upsides are everything worked reliably for me, it was much faster, does chunk-level deduplication and some other things, has native apps for everything, is supported by rclone, has a fuse mount option, suppo…

Yeah, went with that as well. It’s blazingly fast compared to NC.

Re: Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

#66

Post by treve »

Larrikin wrote: post #39
palata wrote: post #27

I would love to like Nextcloud, it's pretty great that it does exist. Just that makes it better than... well everything else I haven't found. What frustrates me is that it looks like it works, but once in a while it breaks in a way that is pretty much irreparable (or at least not in a practical way). I want to run an iOS/Android app that backs up images on my server. I tried the iOS app and when it works, it's cool.…

For your specific use case of photos, Immich is the front runner and a much better experience. Sadly for the general Dropbox replacement I haven't found anything either.

I replaced all my Dropbox uses with SyncThing (and love it). I run an instance on my server at all times and on every client.

Re: Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

#67

Post by nucleardog »

lompad wrote: post #38
palata wrote: post #27

I would love to like Nextcloud, it's pretty great that it does exist. Just that makes it better than... well everything else I haven't found. What frustrates me is that it looks like it works, but once in a while it breaks in a way that is pretty much irreparable (or at least not in a practical way). I want to run an iOS/Android app that backs up images on my server. I tried the iOS app and when it works, it's cool.…

Recently people built a super-lightweigt alternative, named copyparty[0]. To me that looks like it does everything people tend to need without all the bloat. [0]: https://github.com/9001/copyparty

I think "people" deserves clarification: Almost the entire thing was written by a single person and with a _seriously_ impressive feature set. The launch video is well worth a quick watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15_-hgsX2V0&pp=ygUJY29weXBhc...

I don't say this to diminish anyone else's contribution or criticize the software, just to call out the absolutely herculean feat this one person accomplished.

Re: Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

#68

Post by catapart »

Just like any other modern app: first you make it work using frameworks. Then, as soon as the "Core" product is done - just a few more features - then we'll circle back around to ripping out those bloated frameworks for something more lithe. Shouldn't be more than two weeks, now. Most of the base stuff is done. Just another feature or two. I mean, a little longer, if we have some issues with those features, sure. But we'll get back around to a simpler UI right after! Just those features, their bugs and support, and then - well documentation. Just the minimum stuff. Enough to know what we did when we come back to it. But we'll whip up those docs and then it's right on to slimming down the frontend! Won't be long now...

Re: Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

#69

Post by hamburglar »

zdragnar wrote: post #46
robin_reala wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The complete Doom 2, including all graphics, maps, music and sound effects, shipped on 4 floppies, totalling 5.76MB.

The original Doom 2 ran 64,000 pixels (320x200). 4k UHD monitors now show 8.3 million pixels. YMMV. Of course, Doom 2 is full of Carmack shenanigans to squeeze every possible ounce of performance out of every byte, written in hand optimized C and assembly. Nextcloud is delivered in UTF-8 text, in a high level scripting language, entirely unoptimized with lots of low hanging fruit for improvement.

I mean, if you’re going to include carmack’s relentless optimizer mindset in the description, I feel like your description of the NextCloud situation should probably end with “and written by people who think shipping 15MB of JavaScript per page is reasonable.”

Re: Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

#70

Post by seemaze »

lompad wrote: post #38
palata wrote: post #27

I would love to like Nextcloud, it's pretty great that it does exist. Just that makes it better than... well everything else I haven't found. What frustrates me is that it looks like it works, but once in a while it breaks in a way that is pretty much irreparable (or at least not in a practical way). I want to run an iOS/Android app that backs up images on my server. I tried the iOS app and when it works, it's cool.…

Recently people built a super-lightweigt alternative, named copyparty[0]. To me that looks like it does everything people tend to need without all the bloat. [0]: https://github.com/9001/copyparty

I found copyparty to be too busy on the UI/UX side of things. I've settled on dufs[0], quick to deploy, fast to use use, and cross platform.

[0] https://github.com/sigoden/dufs

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