[ADVICE] Is my setup good?

🚧 Installation
1

Hey,

I work as a video creator. I am a beginner in self-hosting. I have set up a server with Nextcloud like this :

Mac Mini 2012 (i7 4C 8T 2,6 Ghz 16GB Ram SSD)
Docker : Reverse Proxy + Nextcloud

I can access to Nextcloud from internet in a browser : it’s slow.
I can sync my work with my server, a 50GB folder : it takes a lot of power from my Mac Mini, and very often the server crash, like “Bad Gateway”. The sync eventually complete, but painfully.

I use to have an old DS411j NAS, it was a bit slow and I was thinking that with a powerfull Mac Mini my server would be lighning fast. But it’s really not.

So using Nextcloud for sync in Docker in mac (I know it’s running in a VM) is a bad idea ?
A Linux server would be much more powerfull because all native ?

I am a bit lost here !

Thanks a lot !

2

I haven’t used any containers so far, my personal view is that they can make it easier to run in the first place but optimization can be more difficult especially with reverse proxies and stuff like that. You have to find the bottleneck of the setup.

On a native Linux system, you can do a lot of tuning and the performance on such a machine shouldn’t be bad. However, you will never reach speed like with SMB, NFS, SFTP etc. protocols on local network.

3

Thanks for your feedback.
I think I am going to try a “Sync only” solution, for my needs it may be more appropriate. Can’t seems to have Mac/Docker/Nextcloud working smooth!
Thanks !

4

You’re using Docker for mac, right? You have a folder mount for your Nextcloud data (like -v=/Users/xyz/nexctloud-data:/var/www/data)? This could very well be the source of your performance issues. See https://forums.docker.com/t/file-access-in-mounted-volumes-extremely-slow-cpu-bound/8076 for reference

In my experience, using a NFS-share instead of a folder mount/volume mount (can’t find a link to the tutorial right now, sorry) works better, but not as smooth as using a virtual machine. Try using Virtual Box or VMWare to start up a debian or ubuntu and run PHP applications in there (hell, even run docker in the VM, it will most probably be faster in terms of file system access).

Otherwise, always good to recycle old hardware :slight_smile: Don’t give up :slight_smile:

– Thomas