Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

ounapuu.ee

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 359 posts

Re: Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

#231

Post by dns_snek »

exe34 wrote: post #59
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.…

I use syncthing, I've got a folder shared between my phone, laptop and media center, and it just syncs everything easily.

It works well for smaller folders but it slows down to a crawl with folders that contain thousands of files. If I add a file to an empty shared folder it will sync almost instantly but if I take a photo both sides become aware of the change rather quickly but then they just sit around for 5 minutes doing nothing before starting the transfer.

Re: Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

#232

Post by jacomoRodriguez »

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.…

I switch to FolderSync for the upload from mobile. Works like a charm!

I know, it sucks that the official apps are buggy as hell, but the server side is real solid

Re: Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

#233

Post by palata »

cortesoft wrote: post #226
palata wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it recover though, or do you end up in situations where your setup is essentially broken? Like if I backup photos from iOS, then remove a subset of those from iOS to make space on the phone (but obviously I want to keep them on the cloud), and later the mobile app gets out of sync, I don't want to end up in a situation where some photos are on iOS, some on the cloud, but none of the devices has everything, and I…

It won't recover unless I do something... sometimes just quitting the iPhone app and then toggling enabling backups works, but not always. I had to completely delete and reinstall the app once to get it to work, and had to resync all 45000 images/videos I had. I have had the server itself fail in strange ways where I had to restart it. I had to do a full fresh install once when it got hopelessly confused and I was ge…

Right, that's the kind of issues I am concerned about.

iCloud / Google Photos just don't have that, they really never lose a photo. It's very difficult for me to convince my family to move to something that may lose their data, when iCloud / Google Photos works and is really not that expensive.

Re: Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

#234

Post by bfkwlfkjf »

imcritic wrote: post #73
bfkwlfkjf wrote: post #58

I've never used nextcloud, but I always imagined that the point is you can run services but then plug in any calendar app etc. You don't have to be running nextclouds calendar, I thought. Did I misundestand how it works?

Their calendar plugin provides CalDAV, so you could just use your local calendar app that syncs with the server over that protocol.

Sooooo why not just host any caldav server instead? Like, why is nextcloud so popular compared to self hosting caldav?

Re: Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

#235

Post by cortesoft »

palata wrote: post #233
cortesoft wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won't recover unless I do something... sometimes just quitting the iPhone app and then toggling enabling backups works, but not always. I had to completely delete and reinstall the app once to get it to work, and had to resync all 45000 images/videos I had. I have had the server itself fail in strange ways where I had to restart it. I had to do a full fresh install once when it got hopelessly confused and I was ge…

Right, that's the kind of issues I am concerned about. iCloud / Google Photos just don't have that, they really never lose a photo. It's very difficult for me to convince my family to move to something that may lose their data, when iCloud / Google Photos works and is really not that expensive.

It has gotten more stable as I have used it for a while. I think if you want to do it, just wait until it is stable and you have a good backup routine before relying on it.

Re: Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

#236

Post by fluoridation »

binary132 wrote: post #218
fluoridation wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. It's because a TLS handshake takes more than one roundtrip to complete. Keeping the connection open means the handshake needs to be done only on…

doesn’t HTTP keep connections open?

It's up to the client to do that. I'm merely explaining why someone would see a latency improvement switching from HTTPS to websockets. If there's no latency improvement then yes, the client is keeping the connection alive between requests.

Re: Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

#237

Post by celsoazevedo »

gloosx wrote: post #193

I was expecting the author to open the profiler tab instead of just staring at network. But its yet another "heavy JavaScript bad" rant. You really consider 1 MB of JS too heavy for an application with hundreds of features? How exactly are developers supposed to fit an entire web app into that? Why does this minimalism suddenly apply only to JavaScript? Should every desktop app be under 1 MB too? Is Windows Calculato…

> Even low-band 5G gives you 30–250 Mbps down.

On paper. In practice, it can be worse than that.

I've spent the past year using a network called O2 here in the UK. Their 5G SA coverage depends a lot on low band (n28/700MHz) and had issues in places where you'd expect it to work well (London, for example). I've experienced sub 1Mbps speeds and even data failing outdoors more than once. I have a good phone, I'm in a city, and using what until a recent merger was the largest network in the country.

I know it's not like this everywhere or all the time, but for those working on sites, apps, etc, please don't assume good speeds are available.

Re: Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

#238

Post by hedora »

c-hendricks wrote: post #178
troyvit wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> it's requirements are pretty opinionated (Ubuntu LTS 22.04 or 24.04 Hm? > This guide describes an installation of Infinite Scale based on Ubuntu LTS and docker compose. The underlying hardware of the server can be anything as listed below as long it meets the OS requirements defined in the Software Stack https://doc.owncloud.com/ocis/next/depl-examples/ubuntu-comp... The Software Stack section goes on to say it's j…

If the developers can only get it to run in a pile of ubuntu containers, then it's extremely likely they haven't thought through basic things you need to operate a service, like supply chain security, deterministic builds, unit testing, upgrades, etc.

Re: Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

#239

Post by fluoridation »

riskable wrote: post #190
Joeri wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That 15mb still needs to be parsed on every page load, even if it runs in interpreted mode. And on low end devices there’s very little cache, so the working set is likely to be far bigger than available cache, which causes performance to crater.

Ah, that's the thing: "on page load". A one-time expense! If you're using modern page routing, "loading a new URL" isn't actually loading a new page... The client is just simulating it via your router/framework by updating the page URL and adding an entry to the history. Also, 15MB of JS is nothing on modern "low end devices". Even an old, $5 Raspberry Pi 2 won't flinch at that and anything slower than that... isn't…

>There comes a point where supporting 10yo devices isn't worth it

Ten years isn't what it used to be in terms of hardware performance. Hell, even back in 2015 you could probably still make do with a computer from 2005 (although it might have been on its last legs). If your software doesn't run properly (or at all) on ten-year-old hardware, it's likely people on five-year-old hardware, or with a lower budget, are getting a pretty shitty experience.

I'll agree that resources are finite and there's a point beyond which further optimizations are not worthwhile from a business sense, but where that point lies should be considered carefully, not picked arbitrarily and the consequences casually handwaved with an "eh, not my problem".

Re: Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

#240

Post by exe34 »

dns_snek wrote: post #231
exe34 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use syncthing, I've got a folder shared between my phone, laptop and media center, and it just syncs everything easily.

It works well for smaller folders but it slows down to a crawl with folders that contain thousands of files. If I add a file to an empty shared folder it will sync almost instantly but if I take a photo both sides become aware of the change rather quickly but then they just sit around for 5 minutes doing nothing before starting the transfer.

how many thousands? I have a folder with a total of 12760 files spread within several folders, but the largest I think is the one with 3827 files.

I've noticed the sync isn't instantaneous, but if I ping one device from the other, it starts immediately. I think Android has some kind of network related sleep somewhere, since the two nixos ones just sync immediately.

Post reply on HN