Why Nextcloud feels slow to use • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

#121

Post by troyvit » Mon, Nov 03, 2025, 4:07 PM UTC

aborsy wrote: post #74

A good thing thing about Nextcloud is that by learning one tool, you get a full suite of collaboration apps: sync, file sharing, calendar, notes, collectives, office (via Collabora or OnlyOffice), and more. These features are pretty good, plus, you get things like photo management and Talk, which are decent. Sure, some people might argue that there are specialized tools for each of these functions. And that’s true. B…

The thing I don't get is that based on the article the front-end is as bloated as the back-end.

That said there's an Owncloud version called Infinite Scale which is written in Go.[1] Honestly I tried to go that route but it's requirements are pretty opinionated (Ubuntu LTS 22.04 or 24.04 and lots of docker containers littering your system) but it looks like it's getting a lot of development.

[1] https://doc.owncloud.com/

Re: Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

#122

Post by paularmstrong » Mon, Nov 03, 2025, 4:12 PM UTC

xingped wrote: post #79

I gave up on using Nextcloud because every time it updated it accumulated more and more errors and there was no way I was going to use a software that I had to troubleshoot every single update. Also the defaults for pictures are apparently quite stupid and so instead of making and showing tiny thumbnails for pictures, the thumbnails are unnecessarily large and loading the thumbnails for a folder of pictures takes for…

I gave up updating Nextcloud. It works for what I use it for and I don't feel like I'm missing anything. I'd rather not spend 4+ hours updating and fixing confusing issues without any tangible benefit.

Re: Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

#123

Post by hamburglar » Mon, Nov 03, 2025, 4:12 PM UTC

bob1029 wrote: post #108

hamburglar wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s the kind of code size where you analyze it and find 13 different versions of jquery and a hundred different bespoke console.log wrappers.

Re: Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

#124

Post by troyvit » Mon, Nov 03, 2025, 4:13 PM UTC

branon wrote: post #11

I have been considering https://bewcloud.com/ + Immich as an alternative Nextcloud's client support is very good though and it has some great apps, I use PhoneTrack on road trips a lot

> I use PhoneTrack on road trips a lot

If every aspect of Nextcloud was as clean, quick and light-weight as PhoneTrack this world would be a different place. The interface is a little confusing but once I got the hang of it it's been awesome and there's just nothing like it. I use an old phone in my murse with PhoneTrack on it and that way if I leave it on the bus (again) I actually have a chance of finding it.

No $35/month subscription, and I'm not sharing my location data with some data aggregator (aside from Android of course).

Re: Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

#125

Post by Yokolos » Mon, Nov 03, 2025, 4:15 PM UTC

riskable wrote: post #104

PaulKeeble wrote: post #53

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…

I've never seen anybody recommend WebSockets instead of REST. I take it this isn't a widely recommended solution? Do you mean specifically for mobile clients only?

Re: Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

#126

Post by s_ting765 » Mon, Nov 03, 2025, 4:15 PM UTC

m-a-r-c-e-l wrote: post #112

s_ting765 wrote: post #90

Nextcloud server is written in PHP. Of course it is slow. It's also designed to be used as an office productivity suite meaning a lot of features you may not actually use are enabled by default and those services come with their own cronjobs and so on.

PHP is super-fast today. I've built 2 customer facing web products with PHP which made each a million dollar business. And they were very fast! https://dev.to/dehemi_fabio/why-php-is-still-worth-learning-...

At the risk of sounding out the obvious. PHP is limited to single threaded processes and has garbage collection. It's certainly not the fastest language one could use for handling multiple concurrent jobs.

Re: Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

#127

Post by accrual » Mon, Nov 03, 2025, 4:18 PM UTC

internet_points wrote: post #48

syncthing otoh barely even has a web ui, so it's really fast :-P

Syncthing has been very "set it and forget it" for me. It updates itself occasionally but I haven't had to fix anything yet.

Re: Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

#128

Post by trashb » Mon, Nov 03, 2025, 4:19 PM UTC

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.

Sure but i doubt there is more image data in the delivered nextcloud data compared to doom2, games famously need textures where a website usually needs mostly vector and css based graphics.

Actually Carmack did squeeze every possible ounce of performance out of DOOM, however that does not always mean he was optimizing for size. If you want to see a project optimized for size you might check out ".kkrieger" from ".theprodukkt" which accomplishes a 3d shooter in 97,280bytes.

You know how many characters 20MB of UTF-8 text is right? If we are talking about javascript it's probably mostly ascii so quite close to 20 million characters. If we take a wild estimate of 80 characters per line that would be 250000 lines of code.

I personally think 20MB is outrageous for any website, webapp or similar. Especially if you want to offer a product to a wide range of devices on a lot of different networks. Reloading a huge chunk of that on every page load feels like bad design.

Developers usually take for granted the modern convenience of a good network connection, imagine using this on a slow connection it would be horrid. Even in the western "first world" countries there are still quite some people connecting with outdated hardware or slow connections, we often forget them.

If you are making any sort of webapp you ideally have to think about every byte you send to your customer.

Re: Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

#129

Post by accrual » Mon, Nov 03, 2025, 4:20 PM UTC

RiverCrochet wrote: post #32

I've played around with many self-hosted file manager apps. My first one was Ajaxplorer which then became Pydio. I really liked Pydio but didn't stick with it because it was too slow. I briefly played with Nextcloud but didn't stick with it either. Eventually I ran into FileRun and loved it, even though it wasn't completely open source. FileRun is fast, worked on both desktop and mobile via browser nicely, and I neve…

On the topic of self-hosted file manager apps, I've really liked "filebrowser". Pair it with Syncthing or another sync daemon and you've got a minimal self-hosted Dropbox clone.

* https://github.com/filebrowser/filebrowser

* https://github.com/hurlenko/filebrowser-docker

Re: Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

#130

Post by tracker1 » Mon, Nov 03, 2025, 4:21 PM UTC

jrochkind1 wrote: post #21

I'm curious how much Javascript eg gmail and google docs/drive give you, in comparison.

I just checked google calendar it's under 3mb download for js (around 8mb uncompressed).. it's also a lot more responsive than nextcloud web. Even then, it's not necessarily the size, I think that's mostly a symptom of the larger issues likely at play.

There are a lot of requests made in general, these can be good, bad or indifferent depending on the actual connection channels and configuration with the server itself. The pieces are too disconnected from each other... the NextCloud org has 350 repositories on Github. I'm frankly surprised it's more than 30 or so... it's literally 10x what would be a larger expectation... I'd rather deal with a crazy mono-repo at that point.