Fast Upload, but Slow Download on Personal Server

Support intro

Sorry to hear you’re facing problems :slightly_frowning_face:

help.nextcloud.com is for home/non-enterprise users. If you’re running a business, paid support can be accessed via portal.nextcloud.com where we can ensure your business keeps running smoothly.

In order to help you as quickly as possible, before clicking Create Topic please provide as much of the below as you can. Feel free to use a pastebin service for logs, otherwise either indent short log examples with four spaces:

example

Or for longer, use three backticks above and below the code snippet:

longer
example
here

Some or all of the below information will be requested if it isn’t supplied; for fastest response please provide as much as you can :heart:

Nextcloud version : 20.0.1
Operating system and version : Ubuntu 20.04
Apache or nginx version : Apache 2.4
PHP version : 7.4

The issue you are facing:

My download speed is quite slow, only 2Mb/s, while upload speeds are above 10Mb/s. Both of these are remote.

From my provider I’m getting 80Mb/s down and 15Mb/s up.

I’ve used a friend’s server in France to iperf with and I got:
0.0-10.6 sec 19.6 MBytes 15.5 Mbits/sec.

I’ve performed all of the nextcloud tuning in the documentation. I’ll admit, the user interface is super snappy, I’m quite happy with that, but file downloads are leaving something to be desired. I feel like there is something between either Apache or PHP that is tangling it up but I can’t put my nose on it.

I want to thank this board and this community for all the activity, it’s what got me this far.

Additional equipment:
i5 / 8GB / 1TB SSD

Is this the first time you’ve seen this error? (Y/N): y

Steps to replicate it:

  1. download any file

The output of your config.php:

<?php
$CONFIG = array (
  'instanceid' => 'oc4p6onbjoz7',
  'passwordsalt' => 'r+3Z1okNvQR0ZNx1zDlkEFHFDReY6E',
  'secret' => 'kne+Bem6LjY7QAFlsygylHIfL7tSP4FxOT4oH6A0RMeBn1l3',
  'trusted_domains' =>
  array (
    0 => 'localhost',
    1 => 'nextcloud.[mysite].com',
    2 => '10.1.10.186',
    3 => '98.xxx.xxx.xxx',
  ),
  'datadirectory' => '/var/nextcloud/data',
  'dbtype' => 'mysql',
  'version' => '20.0.1.1',
  'overwrite.cli.url' => 'https://nextcloud.[mysite].com',
  'dbname' => 'nextcloud',
  'dbhost' => 'localhost',
  'dbport' => '',
  'dbtableprefix' => 'oc_',
  'mysql.utf8mb4' => true,
  'dbuser' => 'user',
  'dbpassword' => 'password',
  'installed' => true,
'memcache.distributed' => '\OC\Memcache\Redis',
'memcache.local' => '\OC\Memcache\Redis',
'memcache.locking' => '\OC\Memcache\Redis',
'redis' => array(
     'host' => 'localhost',
     'port' => 6379,
     ),
);

Are you sure your 2Mbits/s download speed are not 2 Megabyte/s, which would be 16 Mbits/s? And the 10 Mbits/s are 10 Megabytes/s or 80 Mbits/s? If the download were this limited through Nextcloud and your configuration, it is hard to understand that your download is about 5 times faster which is about the ratio of up/download of your internet connection.

In general, you can try if the number of files has an influence, normally large number of small files are more difficult for Nextcloud and database cache tuning can make a huge difference.

I asked my users to confirm their speeds and they changed their answer to MB/s instead of Mb/s. I can’t believe I didn’t consider that. Thank you for your response. Sometimes the simplest explanations are the right ones.

Now I’ve got to try and see what I can do about getting Comcast to improve our upload speeds.

16Mb/s on a 80Mb/s pipe is still on the slow side…
How big are the files that were downloaded for these tests?

Keep in mind, with big files Nextcloud splits them into chunks, downloads them and re-assembles.
That overhead might take time…

At the office we have 80 Mb/s down 15 Mb/s up. Remote users were able to max the upload speed (their download speed).

As mentioned, I need to get Comcast to do something about improving our upload speeds. We’re in the Chicago metro area, its abysmal that we’re paying business tier pricing and get such horrid upload speeds. Even if we shell out $260 for 1Gb/s down, we only get 30 Mb/s up. Its criminal.