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Comment by mort96 | Hacker News Reader

I use Nextcloud, but I'm disappointed in their transition from a file host/sync solution to a "do everything" solution. Their sync client has languished and their server-side sync software has severe performance issues; the core of what made Nextcloud valuable to me has seemingly remained untouched for half a decade as they chase everything else.

I hope some people find it valuable though.

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I agree with this but at the same time I find NC very useful as a hub that centrally hosts my data and can then speak to other software using common protocols. For example my calendars, contacts, todo lists and notes are all hosted via NC, and I use WebDAV/CalDAV/CardDAV clients on my laptop and phone to interact with it.

I definitely agree NC's core functionality could be more polished though. Performance issues don't bother me as I only host for myself but there are UI issues and bugs that get in the way of functionality. I feel like everything is 90% there but there seems to be little interest in making it to 100%. The collaboration stuff they are mostly focused on is useless to me but I can understand why it's their priority, commercially speaking.

Occasionally I toy with the idea of replacing it with separate tools for file sync, photos, calendars, contacts, notes, etc, but it's very convenient to have it all as one.

The performance issues are noticeable to me because I'm hosting it on a Raspberry Pi 4. I figured that the bottleneck when syncing etc would be network and disk IO so the Pi would be fine; however when I'm syncing, all cores are pegged at 100% by the PHP processes. I've enabled bytecode cache and Redis and all the other normal performance things, PHP itself is just too slow. And I imagine that at least part of the issue is that every tiny file request or directory listing is its own, separately authenticated HTTP request.

But I definitely agree that all the other things are half baked. The media player in the iOS app is extremely buggy. There's jank all over the place. The photos UI is pretty much unusable if you have a lot of photos.

And then there are the constant updates; I get notifications all the time that Calendar or some other app has received an update. I wish they'd coordinate releases of their official apps so that I can get a notification every now and then that I need to update all the apps, rather than constant individual app update notifications.

In short, as you say, everything is 90% the way there.

I assume you are not running on the sd card?

I boot from the SD card but I have a USB SSD connected which I use for file storage. I have also configured stuff and set up bind mounts such that everything that gets written to regularly (such as logs, the Nextcloud install itself, Postgres, ...) is on the SSD.

In the past, the discussion about sync speed seemed to focus on the webdav implementation that nextcloud uses.

I run Seafile for this reason. The sync client isn't pretty, but file transfers are fast, conflict detection good and it's pretty light on resources.

I have looked into Seafile, but the thing is that I like some of the extra Nextcloud things, especially the calendar. I just wish that file sync was the main focus and not an afterthought.

But honestly, I should probably just use Seafile and get another, more lightweight CalDAV server.

I use syncthing for files and radicale for calendar and contacts. Very lightweight and stable for years. Radicale sits behind a proxy with basic auth, so dont have to worry about patching vulns to much.

Syncthing is also a very solid choice and I'd use it if I didn't need the ability to create links for people - either to download or upload.

I ran OwnCloud for a while, until that project died. I liked that it focused on file sharing/syncing only. Reluctantly migrated to NextCloud and it's bloated beyond belief. It works though, and I've been too lazy to look into alternatives.

There’s OCIS now, which is a very good alternative if you’re only looking for a file sync solution (without all the App platform aspects of Nextcloud)

Enterprise focused software written in a meme language. Not interesting.

There are plenty of things to not like about Go, but it's certainly not a meme language. It's one of the first languages I'd personally seriously consider if I were to write server-side file sync software. (PHP, on the other hand, would be way far down on the list.)

How about you give it a try first? It uses about 1/4 of resources as Nextcloud in my experience, is a lot faster and has a way nicer UI.

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