Nectcloud has always been incredible slow for me. (And that's beside other issues like updates failing more often than succeeding...)

And as I was using it mostly for basic filesharing between my machines and as a CalDAV/CardDAV server I replaced it with Syncthing and Radicale now.

I ran nextcloud for years on good hardware and its always been the weakest self hosted app I have. I moved to seafile for a bit and then ultimately owncloud OCIS.

OCIS is a modern app that is massively better since its written with modern languages / frameworks

Nextcloud is pretty slow in general, but what you’re describing sounds unusual.

For one thing, Nextcloud is written in PHP, so it sets up and tears down its environment for every single request. But PHP has drastically improved over the years, so it’s not that far behind something like Node.

Facebook was originally written in PHP for the Zend engine, and since it was so slow, they forked (or more accurately, reimplemented) it to make HHVM.

Nextcloud still runs on the Zend engine.

I installed AIO on an old machine (retired gaming PC) a few months ago. I use NC notes and file sharing, and have disabled other services I don't need. It's running behind a proxy server. It's worked fine so far. I use Immich for photos though, not Nextcloud. I heard a lot of gripes about Nextcloud for photos.

I've been running tge AIO container for several years now and it is running perfectly fine. I only enable whatever I use, so for instance no Collabora.

But for Collabora, while it should be good for single-person use, if you require some kind of collaborative simultaneous work, you should probably set up the high-performance backend. I did this at work for a NC-instance hosted via Hetzner and it works well when we tried it, but we don't really use those kinds of tools much in our daily work.

Speeds weren't too bad for me, but setting it up was a pain. Even when AIO came out, I spent hours trying to get it right. After several years and tearing it down and rebuilding because something would get messed up, and realizing it was nearly impossible to get it to work with Tailscale instead of a reverse proxy, I decided it was time to throw in the towel. Nextcloud parades as a product anyone can use, but in practice it feels like it was meant for enterprise users.

How did you set it up? All in one, separate database and redis?

Maybe you want to try https://github.com/kd2org/karadav

you arent the only one. I had suck a painful onboarding process with next cloud from the docker setup to the speed of it to the UI that I just gave up and decided to use a combination of immich and syncthing instead.

Seeing most of the negative comments here noting bare metal etc.

Moving to the AIO build solved literally every issue I had with the single exception being the colabora office stuff.

For the image stuff, basic file, download etc... been great.

The Android app gives me grief, but I suspect that's my janky Samsung phone killing it's permissions.

Considering they only officially support the AIO, it's worth trying that out before passing full judgement. It has flaws, for sure, but it's immensely complex and the AIO nullifies many of the variables that they can't otherwise account for easily.

Your issue could be a missing index, check the admin settings page and see if it has any advice.

I also found that my files_cache table was missing an index from way back, I had to empty the table and create the index. But the speed boost was insane, it went from painfully slow to almost instant.

My install is bare metal, all SSD, redis and php-fpm optimization and I'm extremely happy with the performance. Also use transcoding from an Intel a380 and use Memories for the whole family. Works snappy and flawless. You need to tweak the php settings.

I tried to get it working with calibra office, but gave up 🙈and do agree that it is one of the more difficult programs to setup on a server.

It's out of date, and in desperate need of a rewrite. PHP might have been an okay choice 15 years ago, but no one in their right mind should be using PHP for modern server development. (Yes I'm calling out Pixelfed too). With so many languages and frameworks, that's probably one of the worst right now.

Then it was proven that they don't really get modern infrastructure either, as their docker containers depend on stateful code, with combinations of environment variables and php files that need to be stored in volumes, and then plugins which are also stateful - meaning that on new updates they need to go through an "update" process. This is directly opposite of good practice as docker containers should be 100% immutable and be able to run just by using docker run. They also have required volume mounts scattered throughout the OS, it was just never designed with containers in mind.

I can't recommend nextcloud right now, it's incredibly brittle and slow.

I constantly would get files stuck in the database that I couldn’t delete. All of the forum posts would talk about going into the database to fix it, but the whole point of NextCloud for me was to completely avoid database management.

I’ve fallen back to using DUFS or copyparty for most things since I really just needed my file store to be browsable via web in some cases.

I probably would still be using NextCloud if they didn’t obfuscate the file system.