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.
You must log in or register to comment.
Try MySQL instead of MariaDB. They have some performance tweaks in version 10 that aren’t present in MariaDB.
Also, tune your MySQL (or MariaDB) server. Make sure all tables use InnoDB. Enable the slow query log and analyze slow queries (there may be missing indices). If there’s a lot of unique queries, increase the query cache size.
The easy approach is to run MySQLTuner after the MySQL or MariaDB server has been up for at least a week, and go through its suggestions.
There shouldn’t be a significant difference in performance between PostgreSQL and MySQL/MariaDB if both have been optimized. Out-of-the-box config isn’t ideal for a production system.
Depends on how you’re using it. You can wrong an absolutely insane amount of performance out of postgres that you cannot with MySQL.
I wonder how much next cloud leaves on the table?
“Way faster” came from me :D
It is the complete package which makes it way faster…
Postgres, Redis, PHP Opcache, general PHP tweaks ( PHP.ini, child processes etc, use calculator ), HTTP-2 instead of 1.1
For HTTP-2, you can add this for Apache in your vhost:
Protocols h2 h2c http/1.1
For example:
<VirtualHost *.80> ServerAdmin admin@server.com DocumentRoot /var/www/html/nextcloud/ ServerName my.domai.com Protocols h2 h2c http/1.1 ....In NGNIX add this in a new line:
http2 on;
For example:
server { listen 80; listen [::]:80; server_name my.domain.com; http2 on; ....Using NGINX over Apache did nothing for me, so I use Apache with PHP-FPM 8.3, because I am using it for Wordpress too, same for Redissockets. I would recommend not to use a docker container for Nextcloud. I don’t like it for Nextcloud and I don’t use docker for Wordpress. Docker has other use cases in my setup, but not those 2.
This is just my personal setup.
Maybe it can help someone :)
That makes sense. If you start out without any of those I’m sure it’s night and day.
Thanks for the additional input!
Is there a way to self-host nextcloud by downloading one file, docker container, .nzb, .jpg, ANYTHING that includes all these parts and can just plug in and run? Is that a thing, or do all self-hosters spend every waking hour sudo updating?
You mean like the AIO image, the one officially supported way to install Nextcloud?
But if you want to tune it, I’m afraid you’ll have to run
sudo tuneonce per waking hour.Nextcloud AIO or all in one. It works relatively well. I run both my own container and an AIO instance and I’ve been pretty happy with it, I’ll likely migrate to it for my docker only one in the near future. Nextcloud AIO
I didn’t think Nextcloud AIO would actually work with existing files on a separate drive. I know it says it will … but … I’m not interested in buying a gigantic new harddrive to clone all my data to just to run one program.
Also, if it’s running in WSL or a VirtualBox VM it would be fucking hell to get it to play nice with the network.
I wonder what performance impact there would be if you were to move pgsql onto bare metal with enough ram dedicated to caching all of the db data (think: i5 or i7 nuc). That’s going to be my next step with my homelab; I want to migrate everything to a single db host with a lot of RAM and M2 storage and avoid the db process replication I have going on. I have no performance complaints with NC currently, I’m running PHP cache and redis as well as image preview and imaginary.
Does Postgres really help that much? It runs fine for me with MariaDB
Very anecdotally, I saw a little speed improvement but not all that much. DB size increased a bit. I’ll be sticking with it for the time being because why not.
I had been running Nextcloud on an old laptop using Ubuntu, but that machine died. I have a Windows PC originally built for gaming that I am considering using for Nextcloud. Anyone have any experience with NC and Windows? Thought on the DB switch on Windows?
I don’t think you’ll do yourself any favours setting it up on Windows directly. How about docker+wsl2?
I have docker on the machine now and thought I’d try that type of install first. Sorry, I’m not familiar with the abbreviation “wsl2”
it stands for Windows Subsystem for Linux. Here is a link on how to install it.
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
Since i started using nixos i don’t have any problems with nextcloud 🙃
I only recently started using nix and NixOS. How’s the update process for nextcloud? Can you use the self updater?
In nixos you almost never use any “self” thing
You update everything with your whole system at once
Even the installed apps, the true nixos way to install them is through the configuration file
That makes sense, it does sound better to keep it within nixos! I’ve mostly been using nixos to bootstrap servers that run nomad+docker, so beyond the system-level config, I haven’t done a lot with additional software yet.
