A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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We welcome posts that include suggestions for good self-hosted alternatives to popular online services, how they are better, or how they give back control of your data. Also include hints and tips for less technical readers.
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If you're having issues with NextCloud being slow and having errors, it's probably because the machine you are running it on is low on RAM and/or CPU.
I bring this up because what ever replacements you try would likely have the same issues.
My NextCloud instance was nearly unusable when I had it on a Raspberry PI 3, but when I moved it to a container on my faster machine (AMD Ryzen 7 4800U with 16GB of ram) it now works flawlessly.
I agree with this. It needs a good amount of CPU cycle and RAM. Raspi struggled for me too.
My NC instance runs on a 24GB RAM, 4 CPU Ampere A1 host(Oracle), and still struggles. YMMV.
And it struggles as a photo backup host an i5-7xxx and 16GB RAM at home.
It's not absurdly slow, it's just...irritating sometimes.
The backing database type and the storage it runs on are just as important too.
Experiencing the same, a good CPU and lots of RAM would resolve the issue
Even if you ran a basic sqlite nexcloud, if properly optimized, you can deal with millions of files like its nothing. And that is the issue, the bugs and lacking optimization..
4650g + 64GB ram + Mysql and it was file locking on just a 21k 10GB folder constantly.
I have written apps (in Go) that do similar and process data 100 times faster then nextcloud. Hell, my scrapers are faster then nextcloud in a local netwerk, and that is dealing with external data, over the internet.
Its BADLY designed software that puts the blame on the consumer to get bigger and better hardware, for what is essentially, early 2000 functionality.
What exactly have you tried to do to address your nextCloud problems?
I was on the same boat when I was running NC on a container. I switched to VM, and most of my issues have been resolved, but collabora. I am currently using the built-in collabora server, which is slow.
Sorry to hear you've had a bad experience. I've been running the lsio Nextcloud docker container for 4 years without any issues at all.
I have my issues with Nextcloud, but it's still, by far, the best solution I've come across.
For calendaring, I also went with the option of syncthing via DecSync. I can get my contacts and calendar on Android and Thunderbird, so I can avoid yet another unnecessary webapp.
I love the idea of nextcloud but it really seems pretty hostile towards hosters I would suggest looking at something like Cryptpad which is at least an upgrade to your personal security.
I used NC with postgresql, apps works fine and pretty smooth in everything. Compared to mysql it definitely feel faster.
But now I have no use for NC, I installed File Browser for file exploring. Super simple web file browser.
Focalboard, for kanban.
Obsidian with sync.
Did you switch Nextcloud from SQLite to another database?
Other than that, chances are, whatever makes your Nextcloud install slow will also affect Seafile or whatever else you replace it with.
I spent some time with top and iotop debugging my server performance problems. I found an issue that was completely unrelated to Nextcloud. Since I fixed it my Nextcloud instance has been completely reliable.
I looked into Seafile as well but disliked that it stores my files in some weird block format.
Owncloud.
I personally never caught the Nextcloud hype, and stuck with the original. So far I've heard (and seen, having tried it twoce) nothing but trouble from Nextcloud while my Owncloud install continues to be rock solid for going on 10 years (regularly updated, of course!).
I always recommend OwnCloud. It even has a raw photo viewer plugin and if you know anything about RAW 24 megapixel photos, they are tough to load. But with owncloud a folder full of 30 pictures loads within 10-15 seconds
Same. I ran OwnCloud and Nextcloud in parallel for a while until a Nextcloud update nuked it and my wife lost some of her college work.
After that I've appreciated the slower more deliberate pace of OwnCloud
Went from nextcloud to FileBrowser for web files access, with resilio/syncthing under the hood for synchronisation. My family couldn’t be happier, but yeah - we are not using calendar futures.
Good ole manual file sharing and syncthing for my phone pics
I moved Nextcloud from k8s to a well provisioned lxc container and ran a couple of performance boosting commands and it's been working wonders since then
Files: SYNCTHING CalcardDav: Baikal Notes: Obsidian with livesync plugin and a couchdb as backend ...yeah and webdav for folder shares inside apples files app
Synology Drive is rock solid. Not open source though if that's important to you and technically requires Synology hardware.
Same and looking forward to the responses here. Nextcloud is too big and complicated. I deployed Immich to cover for the photo library. Still looking for a good solution for notes though.
This is where I am right now as well. The main thing (or really the only thing in fact) I use nextcloud for now is file storage, because when it works, it works damn well. I only really need something that can upload and download files easily, which I guess there are alternative for that, but I also need to be able to share the files via link and share links where other people can upload files for me, which so far Nextcloud does the best of the bunch I've tried... So I'm kinda stuck on the decision to switch for now...
Nextcloud is a large and complex application, it does need more resources than one would probably expect.
Nextcloud macOS and iOS apps make running it a no-brainer for me. Nextcloud on macOS works better than Google Drive.
I use linuxserver.io's nextcloud docker image. While I've seen people struggle to setup Nextcloud properly to the point of just giving and installing the snap version of it, I can count the number of times I've needed to do manual interventions for nextcloud with LSIO's nextcloud image. It works like a charm.
I just installed it baremetal, works like a charm.
This is concerning to me because I’ve been considering ditching Synology and spinning up nextcloud. I like Synology drive but I’m tired of the underpowered hardware and dumb roadblocks and vendor lock-in nonsense. I’m very curious what you end up doing!
I dumped synology and just use proxmox for the automatic ZFS support, then I can run my apps in either containers or VMs and even do GPU passthrough if needed.
Nextcloud is great. I don't doubt that OP is having problems, and I understand how frustration can set in and one might throw in the towel and look for alternatives, but OP's experience is atypical. I've been running it for years without any issues. I should point out that I only use it for small-scale personal stuff, but it's good for me. I have it syncing on eight devices, including Linux, MacOS, and Windows desktops; Android phone; iPad; Raspberry Pi. My phone auto-uploads new camera photos. I'm using WebDAV/Fuse mounts on some machines. Everything is solid.
You have not stated the hardware you are running this on. It makes a huge difference. Hope this is not Raspi?
Try Nextcloud-AIO and install the Preview Generator as well. (note that you will need to run it manually the first time). I did struggle as well, before I found the AIO. Now I'm happy. :-)
Perhaps you need something to trigger the webcron so things don’t slow down to a crawl. I use uptime Kuma to trigger the webcron every five minutes and have never had any issues.
PSA: saying "I run Nextcloud and don't have any problems" doesn't help anyone or contribute anything useful to the conversation. It just makes you look like an insecure fanboy.
Disagree, seeing as OP has not posted anything other than "I run Nextcloud and have problems", providing a counter is straightforward and expected.
The OP is exactly the same but in reverse. I haven't had any issues but using MariaDB instead of default SQL.
No, it makes you look insecure about your objectivity. Spreading FUD about a FOSS project isn't helpful, and it's usually down to misconfiguration or poor hardware that it doesn't run properly.
I see plenty of folks who think they've got Redis setup but are following crap guides, so it isn't working.
Take a look at Cloudreve
I open source my homelab as much as I can. But when it comes to backups of my family's photos, servers, and laptops I don't want troubleshoot bugs that could cost me valuable data and time; that's why I gladly pay for a Synology NAS.
Nextcloud was painfully slow on a cheap HDD based VPS, I finally moved it to SSD and it's been fast. With redis and SSD its quick. I'd take a look at your system to make sure that's not the cause.
I use pydio for cloud drive. I think you can try this
If you are willing to consider commercial products, I can recommend Synology DiskStations (at least the plus series). Samba shares are quite easy to setup, you can use Synology Drive to sync a folder between workstations and Android phones which I use for Obsidian for note taking. They also have calendar options, but I use a hosted account at posteo for that.
If you want to stick to nextcloud but don't want to host it, you could consider Hetzner Storage Share. It's fully managed and worked great for me so far. But I only use it to share photos with others, so not all features.