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- Hacker News
- 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.
by bogwog - 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.
by aeldidi - 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.
by RiverCrochet - 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.
by madeofpalk - 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 :)
by xandrius - 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.
by dingdingdang - 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.
by PaulKeeble - 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.
by palata