Hacker News Reader

Comment by q-base | Hacker News Reader

I have tried to switch to Joplin from Evernote twice. But each time I have ended up being frustrated with the synchronisation. It is just too slow in my opinion. Perhaps I have too many notes, but I will be looking for another alternative to Evernote that can work on my phone and Ubuntu.

View on HN

Which backend did you use for sync?

You usually get better sync performance by either self-hosting or using Joplin Cloud. I don't know of any good WebDAV provider, let alone a free one, and even the paid ones have limitations that make them unusable for sync.

OneDrive and Dropbox have a free tier and work with Joplin, but they throttle the connection. But I guess it depends on how many notes you have and how you use Joplin - a lot of people use OneDrive or Dropbox and it works good enough for them.

I sync to Nextcloud. But I can see another responder to my original comment suggests a config change that I will try.

Nextcloud has a surprisingly inefficient WebDAV implementation. It's not clear how they got it so wrong compared to, say, Nginx or Apache WebDAV, but they did. Maybe they are doing some processing on each request, creating thumbnails, checking for shared files, locks, or something that's not really necessary but it is slow as a result. Perhaps some config changes could indeed help though.

Fastmail comes with WebDAV. I used it with Joplin, but it pushes a very large number of files to the server. I have a paid OneDrive account. Found out that sync didn't work with OneDrive (random files just won't sync). Maybe they've fixed it, but I was not impressed.

Is SimpleNote something for you?

It only supports plain text notes (with Markdown rendering), but I've got years of notes in there, and it works on every platform. It's also owned and supported by Wordpress.

I haven't looked at SimpleNote before. So I will look into whether that might be a good fit for me. Thanks for sharing.

I keep looking for replacements but wind up every time coming back to Simplenote. Well worth considering as a baseline to compare other offerings against.

I got a large performance bump by increasing the number of allowed open connections from the default 5 to 20 in all clients. I’m syncing to a self hosted Nextcloud via WebDAV.

I sync to self hosted Nextcould via WebDAV as well, so I will give that a try. Thanks a lot!

The funny thing about Joplin sync being too slow... years ago, I complained to the author that his markdown files weren't true markdown, and his rebuttal was that it was necessary to pollute those to get sync to perform well on Nextcloud/webdav. I pointed out how he might have just written a small NC plugin to achieve the same effect, at which point the thread was closed and I was no longer welcome to comment.

Maybe that's changed since though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com