Limit of Users / Groups before Perfomance goes down

🏷️ General
1

I have no support/technical question and have seen the support category. (Be aware that direct support questions will be deleted.)

on

Which general topic do you have

Hello everyone,

for explanation: we are planning to setup a Nextcloud instance with ~7000 users and want to save files for this users in different subfolders, which will all have a different group (as it should just be visible to the persons who are allowed to save the special data for this subfolder) , so the structure for each user will be like e.g. for testuser

/mydata (with group testuser_mydata)
=> /data_one (with group testuser_data_one)
=> /data_two (with group testuser_data_two)
=> /data_three (with group testuser_data_three)

The user testuser will only have the group testuser_mydata to see the complete structure and there will be manager users which have the permission to save the data in the subfolders like

data_one_manager (has a data_one group for each user like testuser_data_one, testuser2_data_one, testuser3_data_one, …, testuser7000_data_one)
data_two_manager (like data_one_manager for data_two)
…

So for each user there can be up to ten Groups, means in total ~70000 groups.

And now my questions:

  • Is this a problem for a normal Nextcloud instance? (performance problems)
  • Are there any limits to groups?
  • Do we have to care for special hardware to support the performance?
  • Is this absolute nonsense to do it in Nextcloud? :slight_smile:

I hope this questions fit to the General category and someone can help with advice.

Thanks in advance
Sascha

2

By default, you have a main storage, and each user already gets a dedicated folder that they can exclusively use (/path/to/data/username/…).
What is the point of manually creating a /mydata folder for each user, then create a group just for that?

For the number of users, an easy way to split things a bit is to use federated sharing. You can have separate instances, but users can share things between different instances. So you could have a server for departmentA, departmentB, … and so on.

3

Do you plan to use the Team Folders app (previously called Groupfolders) ? (You probably should use it for a usecase like this and use ACLs instead of that many groups)
If not, why not just share to the users directly without any groups ?

Some community apps don’t scale well with many groups, but the core apps and most common community apps work fine with many groups.

I admin an instance with ~20.000 groups which works fine, but you need powerful hardware, how powerful exactly depends on many factors besides the number of groups.

It requires work, but I think it’s possible to get an instance running well even with that many groups, but I would be surprised if there was no way to realize your usecase without that many groups.