Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

https://ounapuu.ee/posts/2025/11/03/nextcloud-slow/

by rpgbr • 9 months ago

457 347 9 months ago

floundy• 9 months ago

I'm still setting up my own home server, adding one functionality at a time. I wanted to like Nextcloud but it's just too bloated.

Radicale is a good calendar replacement. I'd rather have single-function apps at this point.

joshgachnang• 9 months ago

Any good file syncing/drive replacements? My Synology exists pretty much because Synology Drives works so well syncing Mac and iOS.

FredFS456• 9 months ago

I think you could replace Nextcloud's syncing and file access use cases with Syncthing and Copyparty respectively. IMO the biggest downside is that Copyparty's UX is... somewhat obtuse. It's super fast and functional, though.

selectodude2• 9 months ago

Seafile works pretty well. The iOS app is ass though. Everything else is rock solid.

nickspacek• 9 months ago

I've read good things about Seafile and have considered setting it up on my Homelab... though when I looked at the documentation, it too seemed quite large and I worried it wouldn't be the lightweight solution I'm looking for.

ianopolous• 9 months ago

You might like Peergos, which is E2EE as well. Disclosure (I work on it).

https://peergos.org

You can try it out easily here: https://peergos-demo.net

Our iOS app is still in the works still though.

Saris• 9 months ago

Syncthing is great, but doesnt offer selective sync or virtual files if you need those features.

Owncloud infinite scale might be the best option for a full featured file sync setup, as thats all it does.

sira04• 9 months ago

Pretty happy with Resilio Sync. I use it on Mac, and linux in a docker container.

zeagle2• 9 months ago

I went from cloud to local smb shares to nextcloud to seafile. Really happy with the latter. Works, no bloat, versioning and some file sharing. The pro version is free with 3 or less usernames. I use the cli client to mount the libraries into folders and share that with smb + subst X: into the root directory on laptops for family. Borgbackup of that offsite for backup.

lompad2• 9 months ago

Copyparty. Found that recently and absolutely love it.

thesuitonym2• 9 months ago

rsync, ftp, and smb have all existed for decades and work very well on spotty, slow connections (maybe not smb) and are very, very small utilities.

imcritic6• 9 months ago

Unison. Unfortunately it has no mobile apps, though.

mlok• 9 months ago

Could an installable PWA solve this ?

ilumanty• 9 months ago

Could more diligence in the codebase solve this?

thesuitonym2• 9 months ago

Could ignoring the problem solve this ?

andai• 9 months ago

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

robin_reala• 9 months ago

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

zdragnar2• 9 months ago

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.

chaostheory2• 9 months ago

Sure, but what people leave out is that it’s mostly C and assembly. That just isn’t realistic anymore if you want a better developer experience that leads to faster feature rollout, better security, and better stabilty.

This is like when people reminisce about the performance of windows 95 and its apps while forgetting about getting a blue screen of death every other hour.

magicalhippo3• 9 months ago

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.

trashb2• 9 months ago

Exactly javascript is a higher level language with a lot of required functionality build in. When compared to C you would need to (for most tasks) write way less actual code in javascript to achieve the same result, for example graphics or maths routines. Therefore it's crazy that it's that big.

tracker16• 9 months ago

I think it's a double edged sword of Open-Source/FLOSS... some problems are hard and take a lot of effort. One example I consistently point to is core component libraries... React has MUI and Mantine, and I'm not familiar with any open-source alternatives that come close. As a developer, if there was one for Leptos/Yew/Dioxus, I'd have likely jumped ship to Rust+WASM. They're all fast enough with different advantges and disadvantages.

All said... I actually like TypeScript and React fine for teams of developers... I think NextCloud likely has coordination issues that go beyond the language or even libraries used.

mrweasel• 9 months ago

The article suggests that it takes 14MB of Javascript to do just the calendar. I doubt that all of my calendar events for 2025 is 14MB.

magicalhippo3• 9 months ago

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

branon2• 9 months ago

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

zeagle2• 9 months ago

Immich is a night and day improvement for photos vs nextcloud. You could roll it in addition if you wanted to try.

glenstein3• 9 months ago

Fantastic recommendation, it's like exactly what the doctor ordered given the premise of this thread. Does Bewcloud play nice with DAV or other open protocols or (dare I hope) nextcloud apps? I wouldn't mind using nextcloud apps paired with a better web front end.

BrunoBernardino2• 9 months ago

bewCloud creator here, it does play nice with WebDAV, CalDAV, and CardDav. That's what's used for file/photo sync, calendars, and contacts.

It does not support Nextcloud apps (and I don't ever plan to). If you're looking for extensibility, it's not a great option for you (I've been feeling some "pressure" to add a plugin system, but I'm very concerned it'll compromise bewCloud's main value drivers — it's speed, low resource use, simplicity, and ease of use).

troyvit7• 9 months ago

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).

meonkeys2• 9 months ago

PhoneTrack +1, if you don't mind some tinkering. It looks like a power tool someone made with great care.

I wish there was a better client-side view/share app. I've been meaning to try Dawarich, I've heard it does this better.

bArray2• 9 months ago

NextCloud does feel slow. What I want is not only a cloud service that does lots of common tasks, but it also should do it lightly and simply.

I'm extremely tempted to write a lightweight alternative. I'm thinking sourcehut [1] vs GitHub.

[1] https://sourcehut.org/

mickael-kerjean• 9 months ago

I made one such lightweight alternative frontend: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash

jhot• 9 months ago

I've been running filestash in front of sftpgo (using a combination of s3 and nfs for file backends) for a couple years now and have been very happy with it.

tokarf2• 9 months ago

Just compare comparable products.

Nextcloud is an old product that inherit from Owncloud developed in php since 2010. It has extensibility at its core through the thousands of extensions available.

So yaaay compare it with source hut ...

alecsm• 9 months ago

Maybe that's the problem "old product that inherit from Owncloud".

bn-usd-mistake• 9 months ago

Aren't you just confirming the parent that Nextcloud is the big, feature-rich behemoth like Github?

bArray2• 9 months ago

Just compare comparable products.
So yaaay compare it with source hut ...

I'm not saying that sourcehut is the same in any way, but I want the difference between GitHub and sourcehut to be the difference between NextCloud and alternative.

Nextcloud is an old product that inherit from Owncloud developed in php since 2010.

Tough situation to be in, I don't envy it.

It has extensibility at its core through the thousands of extensions available.

Sure, but I think for some limited use cases, something better could be imagined.

preya2k5• 9 months ago

Take a look at OpenCloud. It's a Go-based rewrite of the former OwnCloud team.

It works very well, has polished UI and uses very little resources. It also does a lot less than Nextcloud.

https://github.com/opencloud-eu

tokarf2• 9 months ago

Nextcloud not perfect but it's still one of a major project that has not shifted to business oriented licence and where all components are available and not paywalled with enterprise edition.

So yes not perfect, bloated js but it works and is maintained.

So I'd rather thanks all developers involved in nextcloud than whine about bloated js.

yupyupyups• 9 months ago

So I'd rather thanks all developers involved in nextcloud than whine about bloated js.

Good news! You can do both.

Propelloni• 9 months ago

That's not quite right. There are features that are only available to enterprise customers, or require proprietary plug-ins like Sendent.

Do I need them for my home server? No. Do I need them for my company? Yes, but costs compared to MS 365 are negligible.

jrochkind13• 9 months ago

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

a3w• 9 months ago

gmail should be server sided, with as much JS as you want to use. Unless they moved away from the philosophy they started with GWT (Google Web Toolkit) for Gmail, and perhaps even Inbox (RIP)

tracker16• 9 months ago

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.

jrochkind13• 9 months ago

OP really focused on payload size, is why I was curious.

On a clean page load [of nextcloud], you will be downloading about 15-20 MB of Javascript, which does compress down to about 4-5 MB in transit, but that is still a huge amount of Javascript. For context, I consider 1 MB of Javascript to be on the heavy side for a web page/app.
…Yes, that Javascript will be cached in the browser for a while, but you will still be executing all of that on each visit to your Nextcloud instance, and that will take a long time due to the sheer amount of code your browser now has to execute on the page.

While Nextcloud may have a ~60% bigger JS payload, sounds like perhaps that could have been a bit of a misdirection/misdiagnosis, and it's really about performance characteristics of the JS rather than strictly payload size or number of lines of code executed.

On a Google Doc load chosen by whatever my browser location bar autocompleted, I get around twenty JS files, the two biggest are 1MB and 2MB compressed.

esafak• 9 months ago

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

bastawhiz3• 9 months ago

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 like an email client and file storage are apps and not pages so a SPA isn't unreasonable. The thing is, you don't end up with this much code by being diligent and following best practices. You get here by being lazy or uninformed.

nullgeo• 9 months ago

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.

eMerzh• 9 months ago

I think, some of the issues here is that first nextcloud tries to be compatible with any managed / mutualized hosting.

They also treat every "module"/"apps" whatever you call it, as completely distinct spa without proving much of a sdk/framework. Which mean each app, add is own deps, manage is own build, etc...

Also don't forget that app can even be a part of a screen not the whole thing

ivolimmen• 9 months ago

On the same note a jira ticket as configured where I work the entire page is 42mb. And I use ad blockers so I already skip the page counting stuff

freefaler• 9 months ago

Wow, that's a lot. Our local installation zero cache request (to not suffer their slooooow cloud):

82 / 86 requests 1,694 kB / 1,754 kB transferred 6,220 kB / 6,281 kB resources Finish: 11.73 s DOMContentLoaded: 1.07 s Load: 1.26 s

palata7• 9 months ago

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. It's just that once in a while I get errors like "locked webdav" files and it never seems to recover, or sometimes it just stops synchronising and the only way to recover seems to be to restart the sync from zero. It will gladly upload 80GB of pictures "for nothing", discarding each one when it arrives on the server because it already exists (or so it seems, maybe it just overwrites everything).

The thing is that I want my family to use the app, so I can't access their phone for multiple hours every 2 weeks; it has to work reliably.

If it was just for backing up my photos... well I don't need Nextcloud for that.

Again, alternatives just don't seem to exist, where I can install an app on my parent's iOS and have it synchronise their photo gallery in the background. Except I guess iCloud, that is.

dade_• 9 months ago

The next cloud android app is particularly bad if you use it to back up your cameras DCIM directory then you delete the photos on your phone. It overwrite the files on Nextcloud as new photos are taken. I get why this happened but it is terrible.

Yie1cho5• 9 months ago

it's bad for everything.

i have lots of txt files on my phone which are just not synced up to my server (the files on the server are 0 byte long).

i'm using txt files to take notes because the Notes app never worked for me (I get sync errors on any android phone while it works on iphone).

branon2• 9 months ago

Will this also happen if you let the Nextcloud app rename the files as it uploads them? I usually take that option and haven't had an issue with this although I don't have it set to delete from my phone after uploading.

lompad2• 9 months ago

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

nucleardog2• 9 months ago

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.

seemaze2• 9 months ago

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

johnsea2• 9 months ago

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 grateful to the developers.

Hopefully they are able to act upon such findings or rewrite it with go :-). Mmh, if Berlin (Germany) wouldn't waste so much money in ill-advised ideology-driven and long-term state-destroying actions and "NGOs" they had enough money to fund 100s of such rewrites. Alas...

scrollop• 9 months ago

Copyparty looks amazing, wow

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

Dylan16807• 9 months ago

everything people tend to need
NOTE: full bidirectional sync, like what nextcloud and syncthing does, will never be supported! Only single-direction sync (server-to-client, or client-to-server) is possible with copyparty

Is sync not the primary use of nextcloud?

peanut-walrus• 9 months ago

Personally, the only thing I need is stable clients on both desktop and mobile with bidirectional sync. Copyparty seems really cool, but it explicitly does not do that.

hebelehubele• 9 months ago

It's an amazing piece of software. If only the code & the configuration was readable. It's overly reliant on 2-3 letter abbreviations, which I'm sure has a system, but I haven't yet been able to decipher.

Larrikin• 9 months ago

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.

guilamu• 9 months ago

I'd say Ente-photo is at least as good if not better than Immich.

https://github.com/ente-io/ente

thuttinger• 9 months ago

For a general file sharing / storage solution there is also OpenCloud: https://opencloud.eu/de

It's what I want to try next. Written in go, it looks promising.

Handy-Man• 9 months ago

Have you looked into https://filebrowser.org/? While it's not drop-in replacement for Google Drive/Dropbox, it has been serving me well for similar quick usecase.

nucleardog2• 9 months ago

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/

63stack• 9 months ago

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

treve• 9 months ago

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.

redrblackr4• 9 months ago

There is also "memories for nextcloud" which basically matches immich in feature set (was ahead until last month), nextcloud+memories make a very strong replacement for gdrive or dropbox

cortesoft3• 9 months ago

I love immich, too, but I have also ran into a lot of issues with syncing large libraries. The iPhone app will just hang sometimes.

conradev• 9 months ago

I use Syncthing as a Dropbox replacement, and I like it. I have a machine at home running it that is accessible over the net. Not the prettiest, but it works!

jaden• 9 months ago

I too have found Syncthing + Filebrowser to be a sufficient substitute for Dropbox.

palata7• 9 months ago

Does its iOS/Android app automatically backup the photos in the background? When I looked into Immich (didn't try it) it sounded like it was more of a server thing. I need the automation so that my family can forget about it.

pjs_• 9 months ago

I’ve tried every scheme under the sun and Immich is the only thing I’ve ever seen that actually works for this use case

exe343• 9 months ago

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

kelvinjps10• 9 months ago

I do the same it's so convenient

dns_snek2• 9 months ago

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.

benhurmarcel• 9 months ago

I stopped using Nextcloud when the iOS app lost data.

For some reason the app disconnected from my account in the background from time to time (annoying but didn't think it was critical). Once I pasted data on Nextcloud through the Files app integration, it didn't sync because it was disconnected and didn't say anything, and it lost the data.

xeromal• 9 months ago

Oof, sounds painful. It's hard to use anything when you can't trust its fundamentals.

ToucanLoucan3• 9 months ago

I never had data outright vanish, but similar to the comment you replied to, it was just unreliable. I found Syncthing much more useful over the long haul. The last 3 times I've had to do anything with it were simply to manage having new machines replace old ones.

Syncthing sadly doesn't let you not download some folders or files, but I just moved those to other storage. It beats the Nextcloud headache.

pdntspa• 9 months ago

SyncThing

stavros• 9 months ago

For photos, you can't beat Immich.

nolan879• 9 months ago

This also happened to me with my nextcloud, thankfully I did not lose any photos. I transitioned to Immich for my photos and have not looked back.

jacomoRodriguez• 9 months ago

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

jjav• 9 months ago

Nextcloud is great, but I don't use it for backup (didn't realize it would even do that) so maybe that's why.

I use it for a family cloud service for chat, shared todo lists, shared calendar and shared editing docs (don't want to put anything private on e.g. google docs).

For all that, it's full of awesome.

zelphirkalt2• 9 months ago

You could set up Syncthing. Once properly configured (including ignored files, that have names that cannot be handled by the backing storage or clients), you shouldn't need to touch it much.

cess112• 9 months ago

WebDAV is a nightmare, breaks when you least need it. Once I moved a few TB over it, it took a week with all the retries and troubleshooting.

As I understand it you can work around it with Nextcloud by running some other transfer service and have it watch and automatically import certain directories.

ergocoder• 9 months ago

The majority of CEO job is excellent judgement and motivating people.

Ain't that the problem with everything. They all look good on paper until you try it for a while.

caycep• 9 months ago

All I know about Nextcloud is that HN is full of people complaining about Nextcloud

Yie1cho5• 9 months ago

nextcloud just feels abandoned, even if it isn't of course.

maybe paying customers are getting a different/updated/tuned version of it. maybe not. but the only thing that keeps me using it is there isn't any real selfhosted alternatives.

why is it slow? if you just blink or take a breath, it touches the database. years ago i've tried to optimise it a bit and noticed that there are horrible amount of DB transactions there without any apparent reason.

also, the android client is so broken...

MrDresden• 9 months ago

I'm not sure why you feel like it is abandoned. There is a steady release cadence and the changelog[0] clearly shows that much is being worked on.

[0] https://nextcloud.com/changelog/#latest32

Yie1cho5• 9 months ago

yes of course there's progress and new features and it's not really abandoned per se.

but the feeling is that the outdated or simply bad decisions aren't fixed or redesigned.

it could be made 100 times better.

estimator72923• 9 months ago

Because it feels worse and more broken as time goes on. Just like any other abandoned web app, except it's being made worse and slower as an active, deliberate, ongoing choice

RiverCrochet• 9 months ago

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 never had an issue with it. It was free for personal use a few years ago, and unfortunately is not anymore. But it's worth the license if you have the money for it.

I tried setting up SeaFile but I had issues getting it working via a reverse proxy and gave up on it.

I like copyparty (https://github.com/9001/copyparty) - really dead simple to use and quick like FIleRun - but the web interface is not geared towards casual users. I also miss Filerun's "Request a file" feature which worked very nicely if you just wanted someone to upload a file to you and then be done.

accrual3• 9 months ago

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

iN7h33nD• 9 months ago

Same. Just recently switch over to filebrowser-quantum. Can’t quite endorse it yet, but it’s promising so far (setup in a docker compose was a bit like wack-a-mole, but so was the original) https://github.com/gtsteffaniak/filebrowser

t_mann• 9 months ago

Copyparty can't (and doesn't want to) replace Nextcloud for many use cases because it supports one-way sync only. The readme is pretty clear about that. I'm toying with the idea of combining it with Syncthing (for all those devices where I don't want to do a full sync), does anybody have experience with that? I've seen some posts that it can lead to extreme CPU usage when combined with other tools that read/write/index the same folders, but nothing specifically about Syncthing.

tripflag2• 9 months ago

Combining copyparty with Syncthing is not something I have tested extensively, but I know people are doing this, and I have yet to hear about any related issues. It's also a usecase I want to support, so if you /do/ hit any issues, please give word! I've briefly checked how Syncthing handles the symlink-based file deduplication, and it seemed to work just fine.

The only precaution I can think of is that copyparty's .hist folder should probably not be synced between devices. So if you intend to share an entire copyparty volume, or a folder which contains a copyparty volume, then you could use the `--hist` global-option or `hist` volflag to put it somewhere else.

As for high CPU usage, this would arise from copyparty deciding to reindex a file when it detects that the file has been modified. This shouldn't be a concern unless you point it at a folder which has continuously modifying files, such as a file that is currently being downloaded or otherwise slowly written to.

tripflag2• 9 months ago

I also miss Filerun's "Request a file" feature which worked very nicely if you just wanted someone to upload a file to you and then be done.

With the disclaimer that I've never used Filerun, I think this can be replicated with copyparty by means of the "shares" feature (--shr). That way, you can create a temporary link for other people to upload to, without granting access to browse or download existing files. It works like this: https://a.ocv.me/pub/demo/#gf-bb96d8ba&t=13:44

buibuibui• 9 months ago

I find the Nextcloud client really buggy on the Mac, especially the VFS integration. The file syncing is also really slow. I switched back to P2P file syncing via Syncthing and Resilio Sync out of frustration.

tripplyons2• 9 months ago

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/nextcloud-bug-bounty

rahkiin4• 9 months ago

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.

moi2388• 9 months ago

The html object tag can just show a pdf file by default. Just fetch it and pass the source there.

What is the problem with that exactly in your case?

rahkiin4• 9 months ago

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

silverwind2• 9 months ago

https://www.npmjs.com/package/pdfobject works well as a wrapper around the <object> tag. No mobile support though.

internet_points• 9 months ago

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

imcritic6• 9 months ago

It felt unnecessarily complex for such a simple task as file synchronization. I prefer unison. Unfortunately, it is a blast from the past written in ocaml and there is no Android app :-(

accrual3• 9 months ago

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

8cvor6j844qw_d6• 9 months ago

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.

imcritic6• 9 months ago

Kinda. In the long run you will definitely stumble upon a ton of bugs, but they mostly have some workarounds. Mostly.

Yie1cho5• 9 months ago

the question is, what's your use case?

for me it's a family photo backup with calendars (private and shared ones) running in a VM on the net.

its webui is rarely used by anyone (except me), everyone is using their phones (calendars, files).

does it work? yes. does anyone other than me care about the bugs? no. but noone really _uses_ it as if it was deployed for a small office of 10-20-30 people. on the other hand, there are companies paying for it.

for this,

yabones• 9 months ago

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.

PaulKeeble• 9 months ago

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 Javascript performance trace shows over 50% of the work is in making the asynchronous calls to pull those calendars and other network calls one by one and then on all the refresh updates it causes putting them onto the page.

Supporting all these N calendar calls is pulls individually for calendar rooms and calendar resources and "principles" for the user. All separate individual network calls some of which must be gating the later individual calendar calls.

Its not just that, it also makes a call for notifications, groups, user status and multiple heartbeats to complete the page as well, all before it tries to get the calendar details.

This is why I think it feels slow, its pulling down the page and then the javascript is pulling down all the bits of data for everything on the screen with individual calls, waiting for the responses before it can progress in many ways to make the further calls of which there can be N many depending on what the user is doing.

So across the local network (2.5Gbps) that is a second and most of it in waiting for the network. If I use the regular 4G level of throttling it takes 33.10 seconds! Really goes to show how bad this design does with extra latency.

riskable5• 9 months ago

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.

fwlr• 9 months ago

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”.

fluoridation4• 9 months ago

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 once, instead of over and over again.

Yokolos• 9 months ago

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?

jadbox• 9 months ago

How do you feel about SSE then?

amluto• 9 months ago

Why WebSockets? If you need to fetch 30 things, you can build an elaborate protocol to stream them in without them interfering with each other, or you can ask for all thirty at once. Plain HTTP(S) can do the latter just fine, although the API might not be quite RESTful.

jauntywundrkind• 9 months ago

Sync Conf is next week, and this sort of issue is so part of what I hope maybe can just go away. https://syncconf.dev/

Efforts like Electric SQL to have APIs/protocols for bulk fetching all changes (to a "table") is where it's at. https://electric-sql.com/docs/api/http

It's so rare for teams to do data loading well, rarer still we get effective caching, and often a products footing here only degrades with time. The various sync ideas out there offer such an alluring potential, of having a consistent way to get the client the updated live data they need, in a consistent fashion.

Side note, I'm also hoping the js / TC39 source phase imports proposal aka import source can help let large apps like NextCloud defer loading more of it's JS until needed too. But the waterfall you call out here seems like the real bad side (of NextCloud's architecture)! https://github.com/tc39/proposal-source-phase-imports

bityard• 9 months ago

The thing that kills me is that Nextcloud had an _amazing_ calendar a few years ago. It was way better than anything else I have used. (And I tried a lot, even the calendar add-on for Thunderbird. Which may or may not be built in these days, I can't keep track.)

Then at some point the Nextcloud calendar was "redesigned" and now it's completely terrible. Aesthetically, it looks like it was designed for toddlers. Functionally, adding and editing events is flat out painful. Trying to specify a time range for an event is weird and frustrating. It's better than not having a calendar, but only just.

There are plenty of open source calendar _servers_, but no good open source web-based calendars that I have been able to find.

dingdingdang2• 9 months ago

Having at some point maintained a soft fork / patch-set for Nextcloud.. yes, there is so much performance left on the table. With a few basic patches the file manager, for example, sped up by magnitudes in terms of render speed.

The issue remains that the core itself feels like layers upon layers of encrusted code that instead of being fixed have just had another layer added ... "something fundamental wrong? Just add Redis as a dependency. Does it help? Unsure. Let's add something else. Don't like having the config in a db? Let's move some of it to ini files (or vice versa)..etc..etc." it feels like that's the cycle and it ain't pretty and I don't trust the result at all. Eventually abandoned the project.

Edit: at some point I reckon some part of the ecosystem recognised some of these issues and hence Owncloud remade a large part of the fundamentals in Golang. It remains unknown to me whether this sorted things or not. All of these projects feel like they suffer badly from "overbuild".

Edit-edit: another layer to add to the mix is that the "overbuild" situation is probably largely what allows the hosting economy around these open source solutions to thrive since Nextcloud and co. are so over-engineered and badly documented that they -require- a dedicated sys-admin team to run well.

INTPenis• 9 months ago

This is my theory as well. NC has grown gradually in silos almost, every piece of it is some plugin they've imported from contributions at some point.

For example the reason there's no cohesiveness with a common websocket bus for all those ajax calls is because they all started out as a separate plugin.

NC has gone full modularity and lost performance for it. What we need is a more focused and cohesive tool for document sharing.

Honestly I think today with IaC and containers, a better approach for selfhosting is to use many tools connected by SSO instead of one monstrosity. The old Unix philosophy, do one thing but do it well.

rahkiin4• 9 months ago

This still needs cohesive authorization and central file sharing and access rules across apps. And some central concept of projects to move all content away from people and into the org and roles

eYrKEC2• 9 months ago

Why do you need a common websocket bus when h2 interleaves all the HTTP requests over the same SSL tunnel?

redrblackr4• 9 months ago

Two things:

1. Did you open back port request with these basic patches? If you have orders of magnitude speed improvements it would be aswesome to share!

2. You definitively don't need an entire sysadmin team to run nextcloud, in my work (large organisation) there's three instances running (for different parts/purposes of which only one is run by more than one person, and I run myself both my personal instance and for a nonprofit with ~100 persons, it's really not much work after setup (and other systems are plenty of a lot more complicated systems to set up, trust me)

dingdingdang2• 9 months ago

1. There was no point, having thought about it a bit; a lot of the patches (in essence it was at most a handful) revolved around disabling features which in turn could never have been upstreamed. An example was, as mentioned elsewhere in this comment section, the abysmal performance of the thumbnail gen feature, it never cached right, it never worked right and even when it did it would absolutely kill listings of larger folders of media - this was basically hacked out and partially replaced with much simpler gen on images alone, suddenly the file manager worked again for clients.

2. Guess that's debatable, or maybe even skill dependent (mea culpa), and also largely a question of how comfortable one is with systems that cannot be reasoned about cleanly (similar to TFA I just could not stand the bloat, it made me feel more than mildly unwell working with it). Eventually it was GDPR reqs that drove us towards the big G across multiple domains.

On another note it strikes me how the attempts at re-gen'ing folder listings online really is Sisyphus work, there should be a clean way to enfold multiuser/access-tokens into the filesystems of phones/PCs/etc. The closest pseudo example at the moment I guess is classic Google Drive but of course it would need gating and security on the OS side of things that works to a standard across multiple ecosystems (Apple, MS, Android, iPhone, Linux etc.) ... yeeeeah, better keep polishing that HTML ball of spaghetti I guess ;)

bfkwlfkjf3• 9 months ago

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?

imcritic6• 9 months ago

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

bfkwlfkjf3• 9 months ago

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

glenstein3• 9 months ago

If dav works best for you, you're using it right.

I would assume that the people for whom a slow web based calendar is a problem (among other slow things on the web interface) are people who want to be using it if it performed well.

They wouldn't just make a bad slow web interface on purpose to enlighten people as to how bad web interfaces are, as a complicated way of pushing them toward integrated apps.

bogwog• 9 months ago

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.

imcritic6• 9 months ago

Nobody likes the web apps because they're slow.

Web apps don't have to be slow. I prefer web apps over system apps, as I don't have to install extra programs into my system and I have more control over those apps:

- a service decides it's a good idea to load some tracking stuff from 3rd-party? I just uMatrix block it;

- a page has an unwanted element? I just uBlock block it;

- a page could have a better look? I just userstyle style it;

- a page is missing something that could be added on client side? I just userscript script it

Jaxan2• 9 months ago

Do you also prefer a web-based file browser? My main use for Nextcloud is files and a desktop sync is crucial and integrates with the OS.

catapart• 9 months ago

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...

cbondurant2• 9 months ago

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 amount of admin work that nextcloud requires only makes sense for when you legitimately have a whole group of people with accounts that are all utilizing it regularly.

This is honestly the kick in the pants I need to find a solution that actually fits my current use-case. (I just need to sync my fuckin keepass vault to my phone, man.) Syncthing looks promising with significantly less hassle...

tracker16• 9 months ago

Might also consider Vaultwarden/Bitwarden as a self-host alternative. Yeah it's client-server... that said, been pretty happy as a user.

jw_cook4• 9 months ago

The linuxserver.io image for Nextcloud requires considerably less babysitting for upgrades: https://docs.linuxserver.io/images/docker-nextcloud

As long as you only upgrade one major version at a time, it doesn't require putting the server in maintenance mode or using the occ cli.

xandrius2• 9 months ago

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.

caspar• 9 months ago

Been using syncthing with keepass(X/XC) for probably half a decade now and it works great, especially since KeepassXC has a great built-in merge feature for the rare cases that you get conflicts from modifying your vault on different clients before they sync.

The only major point of friction with syncthing is that you should designate one almost-always-on device as "introducer" for every single one of your devices, so that it will tell all your devices whenever it learns about a new device. Otherwise whenever you gain a device (or reinstall etc) then you have to go to N devices to add your new device there.

Oh, and you can't use syncthing to replicate things between two dirs on the same computer - which isn't a big deal for the keepass usecase and arguably is more of a rsync+cron task anyway but good to be aware of.

aborsy• 9 months ago

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. But the tradeoff is that you'd need to manage a lot more with individual services. With Nextcloud, you get a unified platform that might be good enough to run a company, even if it’s not very fast and some features might have bugs.

The AIO has addressed issues like update management and reliability, it been very good in my experience. You get a fully tested, ready-to-go package from Nextcloud.

That said, I wonder, if the platform were rewritten in a more performance-efficient language than PHP, with a simplified codebase and trimmed-down features, would it run faster? The UI could also be more polished (see Synology DSM web interface). The interface in Synology looks really nice!

troyvit7• 9 months ago

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/

c-hendricks• 9 months ago

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 just needs Docker, Docker Compose, shell access, and sudo.

Ubuntu and sudo are probably only mentioned because the guide walks you through installing docker and docker compose.

preya2k5• 9 months ago

Most of the OCIS team left to start OpenCloud, which is a OCIS fork. And it's hardware requirements are pretty tame. It's a very nice replacement for Nextcloud, if you don't need the Groupware features/Apps and are only looking for File sharing.

s1mplicissimus• 9 months ago

rewriting in a lower-level language won't do too much for NC, because it's mostly slow due to inefficient IO organization - things like mountains of XHRs, inefficient fetching, db querying etc. - None of that will be implicitly fixed by a rewrite in any language and can be fixed in the PHP stack as well. I think one of the reasons that helped OC/NC get off the ground was precisely that the sysadmins running it can often do a little PHP, which is just enough to get it customized for the client. Raising the bar for contribution by using lower level languages might not be a desirable change of direction in that case.

xingped• 9 months ago

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 forever. You can fix this and tell it to make smaller thumbnails apparently, but again, why am I having to fix everything myself? These should be sane defaults. Unfortunately, I just can't trust Nextcloud.

paularmstrong• 9 months ago

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.

estimator72923• 9 months ago

My NextCloud server completely borked itself with an automatic update sometime in the last ~10 months. It's completely unresponsive.

I haven't bothered to fix it.

madeofpalk• 9 months ago

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 quadratic" logic in the frontend, poorly optimised UI updates, and too many API calls.

shermantanktop2• 9 months ago

Agreed. Plus if it truly downloads all of that every time, something has gone wrong with caching.

Overeager warming/precomputation of resources on page load (rather than on use) can be a culprit as well.

hamburglar5• 9 months ago

Relying on cache to cover up a 15MB JavaScript load is a serious crutch.

hamburglar5• 9 months ago

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 exceptions, has several dozen slightly unoptimized (but not too terrible) page traversals, … the list goes on and on. The point is this all adds up, and having 15MB of code gives a LOT of opportunity for all this to happen. I used to work on a large site where we would break out the stopwatch and paring knife if the homepage got to more than 200KB of code, because it meant we were getting sloppy.

bob1029• 9 months ago

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.

nikanj• 9 months ago

But at least they’re not prematurely optimizing

kirito1337• 9 months ago

I don't think I will ever use something like that. I work in over 10 PCs everyday and my only synchronisation is a 16 GB USB stick. I keep all important work, apps and files there.

s_ting7653• 9 months ago

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.

m-a-r-c-e-l2• 9 months ago

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-...

s_ting7653• 9 months ago

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.

zeppelin1014• 9 months ago

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.

accrual3• 9 months ago

I had a similar issue with a public game server that required connecting through the WAN even if clients were local on the LAN. I considered split DNS (resolving the name differently depending on the source) but it was complicated for my setup. Instead I found a one-line solution on my OpenBSD router:

    pass in on $lan_if inet proto tcp to (egress) port 12345 rdr-to 192.168.1.10

It basically says "pass packets from the LAN interface towards the WAN (egress) on the game port and redirect the traffic to the local game server". The local client doesn't know anything happened, it just worked.

jw_cook4• 9 months ago

Check if your router has an option to add custom DNS entries. If you're using OpenWRT, for example, it's already running dnsmasq, which can do split DNS relatively easily: https://blog.entek.org.uk/notes/2021/01/05/split-dns-with-dn...

If not, and you don't want to set up dnsmasq just for Nextcloud over LAN, then DNS-based adblock software like AdGuard Home would be a good option (as in, it would give you more benefit for the amount of time/effort required). With AdGuard, you just add a line under Filters -> DNS rewrites. PiHole can do this as well (it's been awhile since I've used it, but I believe there's a Local DNS settings page).

Otherwise, if you only have a small handful of devices, you could add an entry to /etc/hosts (or equivalent) on each device. Not pretty, but it works.

zeppelin1014• 9 months ago

That's a good tip. I had my local self-hosting phase during covid, but if I ever come back to it, I'll try this.

redrblackr4• 9 months ago

Or just use ipv6!

You could also upload directly to the filesystem and then run occ files:scan, or if the storage is mounted as external it just works.

Another method is to set your machines /etc/hosts (or equivalent) to the local IP of the instance (if the device is only on lan you can keep it, otherwise remove it after the large transfer).

Now your rounter should not send traffic to itself away, just loop it internally so it never has to go over your isps connection - so running over lan only helps if your switch is faster than your router..

zeppelin1014• 9 months ago

Good to know!

Jaxan2• 9 months ago

I use it on LAN without a problem (using mDNS). Sure it runs with self signed certificates, but that’s ok with me.

DrammBA3• 9 months ago

The major shortcoming of NextCloud, in my opinion, is that that it's not able to do sync over LAN.

That’s an interesting way to describe a lack of configuration on your part.

Imagine me saying: "The major shortcoming of Google drive, in my opinion, is that that it's not able to sync files from my phone. There is some workaround involving an app called 'Google drive' that I have to install on my phone, but I haven't gotten around to it. Other than that, Google drive is absolutely fantastic.

zeppelin1014• 9 months ago

I don't know why the sarcasm is so necessary. I very much enjoyed Nextcloud and I proudly ran it for the better part of a year. I even ran various NC-ecosystem apps, such as the Office ones. However, my objective was to try it out from the standpoint of regular self-hosting. I wanted to contrast the 'out-of-the-box' experience to Dropbox, which I had been using for many years up to that point. Yes, one was centrally hosted, while the other was self-hosted, but still, that was the experiment I was running. So I'm sorry if I didn't live up to your standards of what a user should be doing to their software, but I sure had lots of fun self-hosting tons of software at that time.

tfvlrue• 9 months ago

it's not able to do sync over LAN

I'm curious what you mean by this. I've never had trouble syncing files with the Nextcloud client, inside or outside of my LAN. I didn't do anything special to make it work internally. It's definitely not the fastest thing ever, but it works pretty seamlessly in my experience.

exabrial• 9 months ago

For context, I consider 1 MB of Javascript to be on the heavy side for a web page/app.

I feel like > 2kb of Javascript is heavy. Literally not needed.

tracker16• 9 months ago

While I tend to agree... I've been on enough relatively modern web apps that can hit 8mb pretty easily, usually because bundling and tree shaking are broken. You can save a lot by being judicious.

IMO, the worst offenders are when you bring in charting/graphing libraries into things when either you don't really need them, or otherwise not lazy loading where/when needed. If you're using something like React, then a little reading on SVG can do wonders without bloating an application. I've ripped multi-mb graphing libraries out to replace them with a couple components dynamically generating SVG for simple charting or overlays.

dmit• 9 months ago

Preact have been fairly faithful to being <10k (compressed)! (even though they haven't updated the original <3k claim since forever)

ndom912• 9 months ago

This post completely misses the point. Linear downloads ~6.1mb of JS over the network, decompressed to ~31mb and still feels snappy.

Applications like linear and nextcloud aren't designed to be opened and closed constantly. You open them once and then work in that tab for the remainder of your session.

As others have pointed out in this thread, "feeling slow" is mostly due to the number of fetch requests and the backend serving those requests.

ndom912• 9 months ago

Many have brought up more websockets instead of REST API calls. It looks like they're already working in that direction.. scroll down to "Developer tools and APIs": https://nextcloud.com/blog/nextcloud-hub25-autumn/

rpgbr• 9 months ago

I wonder how does bewCloud[1] stack up against NextCloud, since it's meant to be a “modern and simpler alternative” to it. Has anyone tested it?

[1] https://bewcloud.com/

BrunoBernardino2• 9 months ago

bewCloud creator here.

Hundreds of people are using it as a replacement. If you don't use/need more than the core Nextcloud apps (calendar, contacts, file/photo storage and sync, notes), it's a great replacement for it. If you want/need/use Nextcloud's extensibility (the multitude of apps), it's not really an option right now (maybe in the future I'll add some sort of external app system, but it's not in my near-term plan).

PunchyHamster• 9 months ago

It is slow and code seems to be messy enough to be fragile. It's also in PHP that doesn't help performance.

jw_cook4• 9 months ago

The article mentions Vikunja as an alternative to Nextcloud Tasks, and I can give it a solid recommendation as well. I wanted a self-hosted task management app with some lightweight features for organizing tasks into projects, ideally with a kanban view, but without a full-blown PM feature set. I tried just about every task management app out there, and Vikunja was the only one that ticked all the boxes for me.

Some specific things I like about it:

  * Basic todo app features are compatible with CalDAV clients like tasks.org
  * Several ways of organizing tasks: subtasks, tags, projects, subprojects, and custom filters
  * list, table, and kanban views
  * A reasonably clean and performant frontend that isn't cluttered with stuff I don't need (i.e., not Jira)

And some other things that weren't hard requirements, but have been useful for me:

  * A REST API, which I use to export task summaries and comments to markdown files (to make them searchable along with my other plaintext notes)
  * A 3rd party CLI tool: https://gitlab.com/ce72/vja
  * OIDC integration (currently using it with Keycloak)
  * Easily deployable with docker compose

mxuribe2• 9 months ago

I know this post is more about nextcloud...but can i just say this one feature from Vikunja "...export task summaries and comments..." sounds great!!! One of the features i seek out when i look for a task, project management software is the ability to easily and comprehensivelt provide for nice exports, and that said exports *include comments*!!

Either apps lack such an export, or its very minimal, or it includes lots of things, except comments...Sometimes an app might have a REST api, and I'd need to build something non-trivial to start pulling out the comments, etc. I feel like its silly in this day and age.

My desire for comments to be included in exports is for local search...but also because i use comments for sort of thinking aloud, sort of like an inline task journaling...and when comments are lacking, it sucks!

In fact, when i hear folks suggest to simply stop using such apps and merely embrace the text file todo approach, they cite their having full access to comments as a feature...and, i can't dispute their claim! But barely any non-text-based apps highlight the inclusion of comments. So, i have to ask: is it just me (who doesn't use a text-based todo workflow), and then all other folks who *do use* a text-based tdo flow, who actually care about access to comments!?!

jw_cook4• 9 months ago

Yeah, I hear you. I almost started using a purely text-based todo workflow for those same reasons, but it was hard to give up some web UI features, like easily switching between list and kanban-style views.

My use case looks roughly like this: for a given project (as in hobby/DIY/learning, not professional work), I typically have general planning/reference notes in a markdown file synced across my devices via Nextcloud. Separately, for some individual tasks I might have comments about the initial problem, stuff I researched along the way, and the solution I ended up with. Or just thinking out loud, like you mentioned. Sometimes I'll take the effort to edit that info into my main project doc, but for the way I think, it's sometimes more convenient for me to have that kind of info associated with a specific task. When referring to it later, though, it's really handy to be able to use ripgrep (or other search tools) to search everything at once.

To clarify, though, Vikunja doesn't have a built-in feature that exports all task info including comments, just a REST API. It did take a little work to pull all that info together using multiple endpoints (in this case: projects, tasks, views, comments, labels). Here's a small tool I made for that, although it's fairly specific to my own workflow: https://github.com/JWCook/scripts/tree/main/vikunja-export

estimator72923• 9 months ago

Like most of us I think, I really, really wanted to like nextcloud. I put it on an admittedly somewhat slow dual Xeon server, gave it all 32 threads and many, many gigabytes of ram.

Even on a modern browser on a brand new leading-edge computer, it was completely unusably slow.

Horrendous optimization aside, NC is also chasing the current fad of stripping out useful features and replacing them with oceans of padding. The stock photos app doesn't even have the ability to sort by date!. That's been table stakes for a photo viewer since the 20th goddamn century.

When Windows Explorer offers a more performant and featureful experience, you've fucked up real bad.

I would feel incredibly bad and ashamed to publish software in the condition that NextCloud is in. It is IMO completely unacceptable.

macinjosh• 9 months ago

Javascript making PHP look bad.

dengolius• 9 months ago

Maybe it because of using PHP?

rafark2• 9 months ago

Nope. Php is sufficiently fast.

jimangel2001• 9 months ago

Nextcloud is a mess. It tries to do everything. The only reason I keep it in production is because it's a hustle to transition my files and DAVx info elsewhere.

The http upload is miserable, it's slow, it fails with no message, it fails to start, it hangs. When uploading duplicate files the popup is confusing. The UI is slow, the addons break on every update. The gallery is very bad, now we use immich.

atoav2• 9 months ago

As someone who has hosted a few Nextcloud instances for a few years: Nextcloud can be quick if you make it work. If you want to get a good feel for how it can be rent a Hetzner storage box (1TB for below 5 Euros a month).

You sadly can't just install nextcloud on your vanilla server and expect it to perform well.

maples372• 9 months ago

Do you have any tips and tricks to share? I'm running a self-hosted instance on an old desktop PC in my basement for me and a couple family members. Performance is kinda meh, and I don't think it's due to resource constraints on the server itself. This is after following the performance recommendations in the admin console to tweak php.ini settings.

atoav2• 9 months ago

Thie was a few years ago so I can't say I exsctly remember, but thinking about PHP performance is certainly one of the good routes to think about.

elAhmo• 9 months ago

One thing that could help with this is to use CDN for these static assets, while still having the Nextcloud hosted on your own.

We had a similar situation with some notebooks running in production, which were quite slow to load because it was loading a lot of JS files / WASM for the purposes of showing the UI. This was not part of our core logic, and using a CDN to load these, but still relying on private prod instance for business logic helped significantly.

I have a feeling this would be helpful here as well.

gloosx2• 9 months ago

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 Calculator 30 MB binary also an offense to your principles?

What year is it, 2002? Even low-band 5G gives you 30–250 Mbps down. At those speeds, 20 MB of JS downloads in well under a second. So whats the math beihnd the 5–10 second figure? What about the cache? Is it turned off for you and you redownload the whole nextcloud from scratch every time?

Nextcloud is undeniably slow, but the real reasons show up in the profiler, not the network tab.

znpy• 9 months ago

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 Calculator 30 MB binary also an offense to your principles?

Yes, I don't know, because it runs in the browser, yes, yes.

j1elo• 9 months ago

low-band 5G gives you 30–250

First and foremost, I agree with the meat of your comment.

But I wanted to point about your comment, that it DOES very much matter that apps meant to be transmitted over a remote connection are, indeed, as slim as possible.

You must be thinking about 5G on a city with good infrastructure, right?

I'm right now having a coffee on a road trip, with a 4G connection, and just loading this HN page took like 8~10 seconds. Imagine a bulky and bloated web app if I needed to quickly check a copy of my ID stored in NextCloud.

It's time we normalize testing network-bounded apps through low-bandwidth, high-latency network simulators.

celsoazevedo2• 9 months ago

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.

gloosx2• 9 months ago

That's really quite odd. There is even no 5G in my area, yet I get 100 Mbps stable download speed on 4G LTE, outdoors and indoors, any time of the day. Is 5G a downgrade? Is it considered normal service in the UK, when latest generation of cellular network provides a connection speed compared to 3G launched in 2001? How is this even acceptable in the year 2025. Would anyone in the UK start complaining if they downgrade it to 100Kbps? Or should we design the apps for that case?

big-and-small• 9 months ago

Such underrated comment. You can really have 500MB of dependencies for your app because you're on MacOS and it's still gonna be fast because memory use have nothing to do with performance.

Pretty much the same with JavaScript - modern engines are amazingly fast or at least they really not depend on amount of raw javascript feed to them.

lurker_jMckQT99• 9 months ago

(tangential) Reading the comments, several mentioned "copyparty", never heard of it before, haven't used it, haven't reviewed but does there "feature showcase" video makes me want to give it a shot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15_-hgsX2V0 :)

skeptrune• 9 months ago

I know that this is supposed to be targeted at NextCloud in particular, but I think it's a good standalone "you should care about how much JavaScript you ship" post as well.

What frustrates me about modern web development is that everyone is focused on making it work much more than they are making it sure it works fast. Then when you go to push back, the response is always something like "we need to not spend time over-optimizing."

Sent this straight to the team slack haha.

nairboon• 9 months ago

Microsoft Teams goes hold my beer and downloads more than 75 MB of Javascript.

aeldidi4• 9 months ago

Nextcloud is something I have a somewhat love-hate relationship with. On one hand, I've used Nextcloud for ~7 years to backup and provide access to all of my family's photos. We can look at our family pictures and memories from any computer, and it's all private and runs mostly without any headaches.

On the other hand, Nextcloud is so far from being something like Google Docs, and I would never recommend it as a general replacement to someone who can't tolerate "jank", for lack of a better word. There are so many small papercuts you'll notice when using it as a power user. Right off the top of my head, uploading large files is finicky, and no amount of web server config tinkering gets it to always work; thumbnail loading is always spotty, and it's significantly slower than it needs to be (I'm talking orders of magnitude).

With all that said, I'm so grateful for Nextcloud since I don't have a replacement, and I would prefer not having all our baby and vacation pictures feeding some big corporation's AI. We really ought to have a safe, private place to store files in 2025 that the average person can wrap their head around. I only wish my family took better advantage of it, since I'm essentially providing them with unlimited storage.

realaaa2• 9 months ago

is Immich that thing? I've played with it, but didn't really dig deeper

they claim they can do it all when it comes to pictures and videos etc

jacooper• 9 months ago

Immich is way better if all you need is photo storage. It's Google photos level.

nyadesu• 9 months ago

Immich is actually usable, thumbnail previews work without any previous setup, and the mobile app is pretty responsive

Unlike Nextcloud, I feel I can rely on it and feel I can upgrade without issues

aeldidi4• 9 months ago

I use my Nextcloud as a general file storage thing, I just emphasized the photo aspect because that’s my family’s main use case.

I have heard of Immich though, perhaps I owe it an honest try someday.

spencerflem• 9 months ago

I think there’s something cool possible in running the NextCloud plugin api over Sandstorm’s auth and sandboxing

xandrius2• 9 months ago

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 :)

aeldidi4• 9 months ago

Yep, this sums it up perfectly for me. I tend to stay away from the extra stuff since the quality is hit or miss (more often hit than miss to be fair), but really there’s something special about having something like it available. I think as a freely available package Nextcloud is immensely valuable to me. I never say anything bad about it without mentioning that in the same breath nowadays.

nxobject• 9 months ago

I will admit: if NextCloud is competing against GSuite funding by orgs and power users with paying subscriptions, how are we going to expect NextCloud to have anything resembling feature parity while maintaining “harder now but better long term” engineering?

realaaa2• 9 months ago

great post thank you !

does anyone have some tips & tricks on how to optimise Nextcloud installation for better performance, perhaps some server-side tweaks can improve things a bit also?

I have one running in a small VM (4 GB ram) and it's OK for what it is, but yeah that initial loading delay is very noticeable ..

meonkeys2• 9 months ago

https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/stable/admin_manual/instal... is a great place to start.

So much depends on your use case. Can you say more about that? And what have you already tried? I'm skeptical their server-side tuning suggestions will improve your "initial loading delay" depending on what that means exactly. If you mean you see a slow cold cache page load of the Files app web UI (or any Nextcloud app, really) then I'd say that's common with many complex JS-heavy web apps, including Nextcloud.

FWIW, my Nextcloud web UI seems as fast as I'd expect. Roughly 5sec to load the Files app completely in Firefox (logged-in & warm cache) and this is roughly the same time Google Drive takes to do the same thing! Navigating folders actually feels faster in Nextcloud Files.

I'm not using the web UI except when I have to. I do as much as possible locally (e.g. editing docs, contacts/calendars/tasks). I mostly use Nextcloud for mobile and desktop file/calendar/contacts/photo/notes/tasks sync & share and it seems to do quite well at this. Server-side I did spend a lot of time tuning at first, but it has been stable for years once I got it to a good place.

sha16• 9 months ago

It's also slow for bulk operations like "mv somefolder/ ..." - it processes each file one at a time rather than a batch operation (I tried it out recently and this was one thing that stuck out).

Vaslo• 9 months ago

My Nextcloud constantly needs updated. One day I started getting some odd random error about the database. The advice I got was do all this convoluted stuff to maybe get it working again. I uninstalled, and haven’t gone back. It’s just not in the same league as paid alternatives.

FrostKiwi• 9 months ago

Running NixOS based Nextcloud for everything. Multiple family members getting their including me getting their Photos and Videos auto-uploaded and handled by NextCloud's Memories [1].

Awesome experience, but you really have to stick to the happy path. Even with a super powerful CPU, Videoplayback was unusable, until a dedicated AMD GPU handled the transcodes. Even though it's Fiber To the home, sometimes Upload speeds collapse for no apparent reason and it's unusable.

All in all impressive such a massive FOSS project runs at all.

[1] https://memories.gallery/

7e• 9 months ago

This is classic open source sucking because it’s built by amateurs and not professionals. Bush league stuff.

janikvonrotz• 9 months ago

Most people here seem to have experienced a Nextcloud version from 3 years ago.

In version 31 the frontend has been rewritten in Vue and with Nextcloud Office aka Collabora Online you get much more than a shitty GDocs.

Of course some apps like the calendar have not been rewritten.

Most readers do not understand what it takes to rewrite the frontend for an entire ecosystem.

dugite-code• 9 months ago

In my experience the bottle neck for any nextcloud install is typically the database.

Unlike many other projects it's surprisingly easy to get in a situation where the db is throttling due to IO issues on a single box machine. Having the db at on a seperate drive from the storage and logging really speeds things up.

That and setting up a lot of the background tasks like image preview generation, redis ect properly.

poisonborz• 9 months ago

I agree with the criticism but wonder why are there no alternatives? Nextcloud, for what most people use it, is a rather simple, straightforward collection of apps, yet not even those single apps have alternatives. Eg. show me a good selfhostable web calendar, it doesn't exist.

Why does Nextcloud, or even just parts of it, not have dozens of alternatives?

ThouYS• 9 months ago

It simply boils down to many software developers not knowing what they're doing

lousken• 9 months ago

It's close to sharepoint and sharepoint takes around 15MB to download.

If you want to run something like sharepoint suite locally, this is the best option. Question is - do you want/need to run sharepoint locally?

I hate javascript and I have it off by default. With that being said, this is a huge app with tons of options. Other apps without compression are just as bad

Draw io - 25MB

Outlook - 30MB

Gmail - 30MB

The difference is, this is oss, anyone can contribute and fix it

kotaKat• 9 months ago

Nextcloud is the most confusing thing I've tried to figure out how to install as a non-Linux user (i.e. Windows admin) being told to "just install Docker then do this".

Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

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