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Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

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101–110 of 359 posts

Re: Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

#101
The major shortcoming of NextCloud, in my opinion, is that that it's not able to do sync over LAN. Imagine wanting to synchronize 1TB+ of data and not being able to do so over a 1 Gbps+ local connection, when another local device has all the necessary data. There is some workaround involving "split DNS", but I haven't gotten around to it. Other than that, I thought NC was absolutely fantastic.

Re: Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

#102
post #84
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Syncthing is under my "want to like" list but I gave up on it. I'm a one person show who just wants to sync a few dozen markdown files across a few laptops and a phone. Every time I'd run it I'd invariably end up with conflict files. It got to the point where I was spending more time merging diffs than writing. How it could do that with just one person running it I have no idea.

That should not happen. I use it a lot and never had this issue, there maybe is something wrong about your setup.

A good idea is to have it on an always-on server and add your share as an encrypted one (like you set the password on all your apps but not on the server); this pretty much results in a dropbox-like experience since you have a central place to sync even when your other devices are not online

Re: Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

#103
post #80
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is not an alternative as it only covers files. Mind what is in the article: "I like what Nextcloud offers with its feature set and how easily it replaces a bunch of services under one roof (files, calendar, contacts, notes, to-do lists, photos etc.), but ". For us Nextcloud AIO is the best thing under the sun. It works reasonably well for our small company (about 10 ppl) and saves us from Microsoft. I'm very gra…

It makes perfect sense to me that nextcloud is a good fit for a small company.

My biggest gripe with having used it for far longer than I should have was always that it expected far too much maintenance (4 month release cadence) to make sense for individual use.

Doing that kind of regular upkeep on a tool meant for a whole team of people is a far more reasonable cost-benefit analysis. Especially since it only needs one technically savvy person working behind the scenes, and is very intuitive and familiar on its front-end. Making for great savings overall.

Re: Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

#104

I don't doubt that large amounts of javascript can often cause issues but even when cached NextCloud feels sluggish. When I look at just the network tab of a refresh of the calendar page it does 124 network calls, 31 of which aren't cached. it seems to be making a call per calendar each of which is over 30ms. So that stacks up the more calendars you have(and you have a number by default like contact birthdays). The J…

I was going to say... The size of the JS only matters the first time you download it unless there's a lot of tiny files instead of a bundle or two. What the article is complaining about doesn't seem like it's root cause of the slowness.

When it comes to JS optimization in the browser there's usually a few great big smoking guns:

    1. Tons of tiny files: Bundle them! Big bundle > zillions of lazy-loaded files.
    2. Lots of AJAX requests: We have WebSockets for a reason!
    3. Race conditions: Fix your bugs :shrug:
    4. Too many JS-driven animations: Use CSS or JS that just manipulates CSS.
Nextcloud appears to be slow because of #2. Both #1 and #2 are dependent on round-trip times (HTTP request to server -> HTTP response to client) which are the biggest cause of slowness on mobile networks (e.g. 5G).

Modern mobile network connections have plenty of bandwidth to deliver great big files/streams but they're still super slow when it comes to round-trip times. Knowing this, it makes perfect sense that Nextcloud would be slow AF on mobile networks because it follows the REST philosophy.

My controversial take: GIVE REST A REST already! WebSockets are vastly superior and they've been around for FIFTEEN YEARS now. Do I understand why they're so much lower latency than REST calls on mobile networks? Not really: In theory, it's still a round-trip but for some reason an open connection can pass data through an order of magnitude (or more) lower latency on something like a 5G connection.

Re: Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

#106
post #83

I once discovered and reported a vulnerability in Nextcloud's web client that was due to them including an outdated version of a JavaScript-based PDF viewer. I always wondered why they couldn't just use the browser's PDF viewer. I made $100, which was a large amount to me as a 16 year old at the time. Here is a blog post I wrote at the time about the vulnerability (CVE-2020-8155): https://tripplyons.com/blog/nextclou…

I recently needed to show a pdf file inside a div in my app. All i wanted was to show it and make it scrollable. The file comes from a fetch() with authorzation headers. I could not find a way to do this without pdf.js.

This made me try it once more and I got something to work with some Blobs, resource URLs, sanitazion and iframes.

So I guess it is possible

Re: Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

#107
post #9

For reference, 20 MB is three hundred and thirteen Commodores.

Or the same number of 64k intros[1][2][3]...

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXgseVYvhek

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWCQfg2IuUE

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lWbKcPEy_w

Re: Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

#108

I don't think this article actually does a great job of explaining why Nextcloud feels slow. It shows lots of big numbers for MBs of Javascript being downloading, but how does that actually impact the user experience? Is the "slow" Nextcloud just sitting around waiting for these JS assets to load and parse? From my experience, this doesn't meaningfully impact performance. Performance problems come from "accidentally…

It downloads a lot of JavaScript, it decompresses a lot of JavaScript, it parses a lot of JavaScript, it runs a lot of JavaScript, it creates a gazillion onFoundMyNavel event callbacks which all run JavaScript, it does all manner of uncontrolled DOM-touching while its millions of script fragments do their thing, it xhr’s in response to xhrs in response to DOM content ready events, it throws and swallows untold except…

15+ megabytes of executable code begins to look quite insane when you start to take a gander at many AAA games. You can produce a non-trivial Unity WebGL build that fits in <10 megabytes.

Re: Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

#109

I don't doubt that large amounts of javascript can often cause issues but even when cached NextCloud feels sluggish. When I look at just the network tab of a refresh of the calendar page it does 124 network calls, 31 of which aren't cached. it seems to be making a call per calendar each of which is over 30ms. So that stacks up the more calendars you have(and you have a number by default like contact birthdays). The J…

I was going to say... The size of the JS only matters the first time you download it unless there's a lot of tiny files instead of a bundle or two. What the article is complaining about doesn't seem like it's root cause of the slowness. When it comes to JS optimization in the browser there's usually a few great big smoking guns: 1. Tons of tiny files: Bundle them! Big bundle > zillions of lazy-loaded files. 2. Lots o…

15MB of JavaScript is 15MB of code that your browser is trying to execute. It’s the same principle as “compiling a million lines of code takes a lot longer than compiling a thousand lines”.

Re: Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

#110
post #38
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

Copyparty looks amazing, wow

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15_-hgsX2V0

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