Hard drive very slow with Windows 10 desktop client

📱 Desktop & mobile clients 💻 Desktop
1
  • several folders synced to Nextcloud elsewhere on local network
  • with Nextcloud client running, desktop hard drive slows (to 500ms access times) and some Windows apps have delayed response (system freeze until Nextcloud client next comes up for air)
  • intermittent, so not constant, but pretty frequent
  • only solved by exiting Nextcloud client (even pausing it doesn’t help sometimes)
  • happened on all up-to-date clients since 2018. Nextcloud currently 20.0.2
2

It’s recommended to run the minor updates more frequently to fix bugs and security issues, the current version of the NC20-branch: Nextcloud server changelog

You sync the whole disk via Nextcloud? Or not at all, only a folder?

The disk itself is ok? Just thinking if there is some problem on some file and you sync the whole thing and the Nextcloud client comes along this problematic file…

There are options to get more details out of the sync client:
https://docs.nextcloud.com/desktop/3.3/troubleshooting.html

3

Thank you, I’ve now updated to 20.0.12.
There are 12 separate folders synced, around 2TB of files.

4

Ok, so it can be that Nextcloud checks the disk thoroughly… however, I’d expect to run in the background. Did you check the disk and can you check the NC client logfiles for obvious errors? You’ll need these if you want to submit a bug report anyway.

I found two issues with large folders and performance problems:

5

Thanks. I’ve scanned the disk - Windows said it wasn’t necessary, and then reported the disk was clean anyway.
I’ve got the log files - one is 470k, what keywords should I search for errors?

6

In the linked topics, they show a few errors you could look for if you see the same problem. I don’t know if there is a real problem/error or if the client is just not optimized for a large number of files.

If you run in timeouts or or other points where the server doesn’t react quick enough, with caching of the file-locks (redis) and database cache setting you can improve this part.

If you errors/symptomatic is different from the other topics, feel free to open a bug report yourself, the developers can give much better hints what to look for.

7

I’ve checked through the linked topics, but they seem to be different symptoms and error messages. I’m not actually seeing any errors anywhere - I think the problem is simply a vast number of files (thanks to code libraries…) and the client trying to check them all and getting bogged down somehow.