Nextcloud seems to have a bad reputation around here regarding performance. It never really bothered me, but when a comment on a post here yesterday talked about huge speed gains to be had with Postgres, I got curious and spent a few hours researching and tweaking my setup.
I thought I'd write up what I learned and maybe others can jump in with their insights to make this a good general overview.
To note, my installation initially started out with this docker compose stack from the official nextcloud docker images (as opposed to the AIO image or a source installation.) I run this behind an NGINX reverse proxy.
Sources of information
- Server tuning on Nextcloud Docs: Most of this are very basic things that are already taken care of in the docker image or in the proxy companion image I'm using. The one thing I haven't tried and that comes up in other places, too, is using Imaginary for image preview generation.
- How to migrate Nextcloud 17 Database Backend from MySQL to postgreSQL
- Eking out some Nextcloud Performance mainly talks about using a socket connection for redis, but also mentions logging to syslog (have not found a good source of information for this), using postgres, using imaginary for image previews
Improvements
Migrate DB to Postgres
What I did first is migrate from maridb to postgres, roughly following the blog post I linked above. I didn't do any benchmarking, but page loads felt a little faster after that (but a far cry from the "way way faster" claims I'd read.)
Here's my process
- add postgres container to compose file like so. I named mine "postgres", added a "postgres" volume, and added it to depends_on for app and cron
- run migration command from nextcloud app container like any other occ command. The migration process stopped with an error for a deactivated app so I completely removed it, dropped the postgres tables and started migration again and it went through. after migration, check
admin settings/systemto make sure Nextcloud is now using postgres../occ db:convert-type --password $POSTGRES_PASSWORD --all-apps pgsql $POSTGRES_USER postgres $POSTGRES_DB - remove old "db" container and volume and all references to it from compose file and run
docker compose up -d --remove-orphans
Redis over Sockets
I followed above guide for connecting to Redis with sockets with details as stated below. This improved performance quite significantly. Very fast loads for files, calendar, etc. I haven't yet changed the postgres connection over to sockets since the article spoke about minor improvements, but I might try this next.
Hints
- the redis configuration (host, port, password, ...) need to be set in
config/config.php, as well asconfig/redis.config.php - the cron container needs to receive the same
/etc/localtimeand/etc/timezonevolumes the app container did, as well as thevolumes_from: tmp
EDIT Postgres over Sockets
I'm now connecting to Postgres over sockets as well, which gave another pretty significant speed bump. When looking at developer tools in Firefox, the dashboard now finishes loading in half the time it did before the change; just over 6s. I followed the same blog article I did for Redis.
Steps
- in the compose file, for the db container: add volumes
/etc/localtimeand/etc/timezone; adduser: "70:33"; addcommand: postgres -c unix_socket_directories='/var/run/postgresql/,/tmp/docker/'; add tmp container tovolumes_fromanddepends_on - in nextcloud config.php, replace
'dbhost' => 'postgres',with'dbhost' => '/tmp/docker/',
Outlook
What have you done to improve your instance's performance? Do you know good articles to share? I'm happy to edit this post to include any insights and make this a good source of information regarding Nextcloud performance.
ive tried to get nextcloud working several times and it just seems to never work for some reason... maybe i should set it up on a pi ive got laying around instead of my main server lol
Have you tried the AIO method that's now the primary supported docker install?
It's really good, and I've set up and used NC in a variety of ways since about version 7.
im not sure / cannot recall. it's been a few months since i last tried to install it and it kept erroring out. im definitely strongly considering looking back into it though, it's just that reverse proxying to the container was a nightmare... it still haunts my config, lol
I use NPM and all I think I had to add to it was
in the Advanced config. I'd love to move to Traefik but I could not figure out how to make that work.
There were some other gotchas. If you run into something, ping me, I might remember if I encountered it and what I did.
My advice: use the nextcloud snap package. It's seamless.
It is, in fact, the only Snap I’ve ever used which worked without issues
That being said, it’s kinda slow in some cases, but perfectly useable nonetheless
I know snap isn't popular among Linux nerds, but I was really having issues with the AIO docker setup and at the time I didn't have the time to troubleshoot/fight it. I needed to give my family a file drop link to share photos for a memorial service.
I figured, the snap package was recommended on their site, maybe it won't be horrible. To my surprise it was incredibly easy, has been rock solid, never had performance issues, and it's always up-to-date.
Snap may suck for some use-cases but this one seems to be right in it's wheel house.
It also has an export/backup capability built in.
that is... surprising. not that i don't believe you, snap just doesn't have a good track record, lol. ill have to research if it's feasible to run a snap package on a debian server, though.