How necessary is redis?

I work at an HE institution where we’re intending to NextCloud to allow access to SMB/CIFS shares.

We’ll be using a (small) cluster of machines for running NextCloud, and it seems obvious that we should run a redis cluster for a shared cache.

However when asked I wasn’t really sure what redis is providing here. The documentation mentions “For local and distributed caching as well as transactional file locking.” which (in part) seems to duplicate what the samba protocol provides.

So what does does redis do for nextcloud, and what are the implications if we don’t use it?

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I think it’s not a problem to start without redis of you have an eye on the nextcloud log.

I had a lot of file locking errors before I added redis.

Thanks. I’ll bumble along without it for the moment.

One thing to mention is that Nextcloud translates the SMB access to it’s own WebDAV so basically you will not really benefit from the build in stuff SMB provides (but also avoid a lot of the mess).

I would suggest to add Redis. Super easy and quick to get running and at least for me it seems to make a significant difference (sorry no hard data on that).

Edit: I think if you want to cluster Nextcloud (behind a load balancer) you will need a shared cache like Redis, otherwise it the php processes will run into issues when being directed to another physical server.

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Apologies, missed this reply.

Yes, I expect I will need redis. I was just interested in how risky it was.