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Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

ounapuu.ee

251–260 of 359 posts

Re: Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows 2000 was quite snappy on my Pentium 150, and pretty rock solid. It was when I stopped being good at fixing computers because it just worked, so I didn't get much practice.

Win2000 is in the same class as Win95 despite being slightly more stable. It still locked up and crashed more frequently than modern software.

Then you did something special. For me Win2k was at least three orders of magnitude more stable, and based on my buddies that was not exceptional.

Re: Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah people there pretty much mean one dude. It's mine boggling how much that little program can do considering it had one dev.

Don't forget, "Lot of the code was written on a mobile phone using tmux and vim on a bus". That's crazy.

Re: Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's incorrect. PHP has concurrency included.

On the other hand, in 99.99% of web applications you do not need self baked concurrency. Instead use a queue system which handles this. I've used this with 20 million background jobs per day without hassles, it scales very well horizontally und vertically.

Re: Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

#254

Is Nextcloud reliable enough for "production" use? Last time I heard a certain privacy community recommended against Nextcloud due to some issues with Nextcloud E2EE.

Nextcloud, and before it Owncloud, have been "in production" in my household for nearly a decade at this point. There have been some botched updates and sync problems over the years, but it's been by far the most reliable app I've hosted.

In terms of privacy & security, like everything it comes down to risk model and the trade-offs you make to exist in the modern world. Nextcloud is for sharing files, if nothing short of perfect E2EE is tolerable it's probably not the solution for you, not to mention the other 99.999% of services out there.

I think most of the problems people report come down to really bad defaults that let it run like shit on very low-spec boxes that shouldn't be supported (ie raspi gen 1/2 back in the day). Installing redis and configuring php-fpm correctly fixes like 90% of the problems, other than the bloated Javascript as mentioned in the op.

End of the day, it's fine. Not perfect, not ideal, but fine.

Re: Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

#256

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…

I can confirm this. We have been using it for 10 years now in our research lab. No data loss so far. Performance is great. Integration with OnlyOffice works quite well (there were sync problems a few years ago - I think upgrading OnlyOffice solved this issue).

Re: Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

#257

I've used nextcloud for close to I think 8 years now as a replacement for google drive. However my need for something like google drive has reduced massively, and nextcloud continues to be a massive maintenance pain due to its frustratingly fast release cadence. I don't want to have to log into my admin account and baby it through a new release and migration every four months! Why aren't there any LTS branches? The a…

Been running NC on my home server and basically maybe update it once a year or so? Even less probably, so definitely not a must to update every time. Plus via snap it's pretty simple.

Re: Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

#258
I know people here don't like it when one answers to complaints about OSS projects with "go fix it then" but seeing the comment section here, it's hard to not at least think it.

About 50-100 people saying that they know exactly why NC is slow, bloated, bad, but fail to a) point out a valid alternative, b) to act and do something about it.

I'm going to say that I love NC despite its slow performance. I own my storage, I can do Google Drive stuff without selling my soul (aka data) to the devil and I can go patch up stuff, since the code is open.

Is downloading lots of JS and waiting a few seconds bad? Yes. But did I pay for any of it? No. Am I the product as a result of choosing NC? Also no.

Having a basic file system with a dropbox alternative and being able to go and "shop" for extensions and extra tools feels so COOL and fun. Do I want to own my password manager? Bam, covered. Do I want to centralise calendar, mail and kanban into one? Bam, covered.

Codebase is AGPL, installs easily and you don't need to do surgery every new update.

I've been running it without hiccups for over 6 years now.

Would I love it to be as fast and smooth as a platform developed by an evil tech behemoth which wants to swallow everyone's data? Of course, am I happy NC exists? Yes!

And if you got this far, dear reader, give it a try. It's free and you can delete it in a second but if you find something to improve and know how, go help, it helps us all :)

Re: Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

#259

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…

But at least they’re not prematurely optimizing

Re: Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

#260
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There is no way it’s going to be completely rewritten from scratch in Go, and none of whatever Germany is or isn’t doing affects that in any way shape or form.

Actually, it's already been done by the former Nextcloud fork/predecessor. OwnCloud shared a big percentage of the Nextcloud codebase, but they decided to rewrite everything under the name OCIS (OwnCloud Infinite Scale) a couple of years ago. Recently, OwnCloud got acquired by Kiteworks and it seemed like they got in a fight with most of the staff. So big parts of the team left to start "OpenCloud", which is a fork of OCIS and is now a great competitor to Nextcloud. It's much more stable and uses less resources, but it also does a lot less than Nextcloud (namely only File sharing so far. No Apps, no Groupware.)

https://github.com/opencloud-eu

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