I tried running nextcloud on an rpi. It just doesn't cut it. I had the 4gb model and nextcloud runs but its a horrible experience. You go on the web UI and click a photo and it takes 10 seconds to load. Moved my server to a ryzen 5 based setup and now everything is instant. I'm not sure what the limiting factor on the rpi was because the ram and cpu usage was low. Perhaps it was memory or storage speed.
Booting off an SD card. I need to change that, but I’m lazy.
I do treat it like I would a Dropbox. I store photos I want to save, documents I want to save, etc. I was using it for recording trips for a brief bit, as well.
I’ve used it to share pictures with friends from our hikes, and I’m on a very fast internet connection.
My usage loads might be sufficiently low to not be a problem. I’m not constantly streaming from it like LTT does their NAS. For major software projects, I might use it as a remote git repo.
I probably have a high speed SD card.
There are times when it’s slow, but not too often. I forget what I’ve done to resolve that.
Also, running the NextCloud app on my computer has never been slow and that’s my normal use case for file management on it.
And if USB, make sure to test the speed. Some controllers need quirks enabled[1] to get speed, including a lot of popular JMicron ones. Mine went from ~20MB/s to 300MB/s for a Samsung 850 SSD.
I moved all my home cloud stuff to an old dell small form factor computer that I bought for 40 bucks from a company selling all their old inventory. It is an i5 4500-something that beats the pi4 in everything except 4k output. It also has an SSD and 8gb ram.
Agree, the pi is way too low power to handle nextcloud comfortably. In the same price range, it's much better to buy a used NUC (even with a celeron!) compared to the beefiest Raspberry Pi 4 out there.
TBF I think this says more about Nextcloud than the Raspberry Pi. I also suspect it can be helped with some setup - I imagine the difference between disk I/O performance is going to be greater than the CPU differences if you're comparing a Pi4 to a recent-ish PC.
I had the same experience with a pi 3 and didn't even try a pi 4. I set up a modest intel box and it was interactive.
The 4 might have a better change with gigabit internet and faster usb, but I was still using a fast samsung fit drive, but not fast enough.
To be honest though - the intel box was modest, but still 4x the price. Additionally it's hard to beat a pi for installation - just insert the sd card. (there is always configuration)
