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- Hacker News
- 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.
by gloosx - > 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.
by znpy - 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.
- > 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.
by j1elo - > 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.
by celsoazevedo - 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!
by aborsy - 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.
by troyvit - 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.
- 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.by xingped
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
by tripplyons - 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.
by rahkiin - 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 - > 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
by imcritic - 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 - 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
by realaaa - 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 - 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.by t_mann
- > 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
by tripflag - 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.by accrual
- 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 - 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.
- 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.by hamburglar
- 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 - 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?by nxobject
- 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.by aeldidi
- 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 - 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)
by redrblackr - 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.
by INTPenis