Nextcloud box [official snap] stops working when accessing huge directories!

Hiya,
My nextcloud box [raspberry pi 3] stops working whenever I access a directory with a lot of files, around 500 photos, using iOS app [ipad].

I reckon it’s because the app has to load all the thumbnails for all the photos. This process will increase the temperature of the raspberry pi 3. Hence, stops working.

What I’m going to do is to buy a heat sink for the box.
Any other recommendations??
Shall I also get bigger sd card size than the one that comes with the box [4gb]? will this help with the performance?

Any advice and recommendations are welcomed. Other than reducing the number of my photos in the directory lol

I tend to split my photos by month/year so if you’re not doing that it will help.
The SD doesn’t really do anything once it’s all installed and running.

Before buying and fiddling with a heatsink, have you considered running a USB fan on the open box? That’ll keep it cooler and if you’re still getting issues it may not be heat you’re struggling with.

Logs are your friend, too.

I tend to split my photos by month/year so if you’re not doing that it will help.

Well that is exactly what he/she don’t want to do.

You can try to connect an external HDD (instead of SD card), especially if you buy a Banana pi. :smiley: Since Banana Pi BPI-M1 has a SATA connector.
http://www.banana-pi.org/m1.html :banana:

Maybe it’s possible to turn off thumbnails or better… it is possible to schedule them via cronjob (if not already done?).

Ow… did you put your Pi in a box or something? Place it is a good ventilated space NO plastic case!

EDIT: You can also choose for the Banana Pi BPI-M2U, which is even stronger.

Futhermore, there is an article about it:

Be aware that you need to cool 2 parts (chips) on the PCB that can get really hot (not only the CPU).

EDIT:

Another topic:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=138193

Splitting is a good idea but I wanna have a gallary-look to all my photos say in 2014

I got myself heat sinks for both chips and a gpio 5v fan. Also, I used a separate usb power for the hard drive [wd pidrive]

Then I tried to test the ~600 photos folder again and ended up with two observations
1- Nextcloud iOS and android app: thumbnails will be shown for a couple of photos and the server crashes. I’m able to ping the server both locally and globally but the server stops working and can’t ssh too
2- nextcloud web and webdav: work fine

However, I’ve uploaded my photos anyways. I’ll try to do another test on my ~900 photos folder. Not now lol. I’m fed up of corrupted folder after I force shutdown my nextcloud box and having to format

Thank you danger. Kindly check my reply to Jason

I’m using the official nextcloud box
https://nextcloud.com/box/
It’s my way to start nextcloud and also support all the awesome ppl behind the nextcloud project

The box now is awkwardly slightly open as the box cannot accomodate the fan

The banana pi looks interesting but I see that raspberry pi is so popular and has heaps of projects. One could argue that it has more community support!

Thanks guys for the replies. I’ll try to find someone who can cut me the box from the top so I can install the fan and hopefully the box will look less awkward

I will continue using android and iOS app for managing my files but I’ll avoid my big photos folders. Perhaps both apps syncs and requests thumbnails more rapidly than the web app that it causes my raspberry pi to crash!
I can’t seem to be able to troubleshoot the incident and say for sure where the problem is though

I’ll try to do more test and sure will keep you updated for any new incidents :joy:

I might as well buy another raspberry box just for testing cause I can’t afford formatting again and again

Well try also to install heat sinks besides only fans. Since you need to get rid of the heat from the chip, best way to transport the heat is using a well conducted heat sink. I used it also for my banana pi, look at the picture.

You see these 2 gray plates? These at the heat sinks…

Yes I did.
I’ve installed a huge one though. I really want this to work :joy:

Thank you

Nice, better is to create an air flow, like from left to right. But nevertheless it looks nice.

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Nextcloud box - it runs off external HDD.

Really, please Google the Nextcloud box.

Understood, truth be told I’ve had more than 500 in one month anyway so not necessarily a great suggestion.

Have you installed and configured the preview generator app? It can automate preview generation via Cron rather than on demand, for photos uploaded before installation you can run a job overnight to generate the previews manually and test the next morning. That should help.

With all that said, I’ve also got a NCbox running a Pi 2 and have never had it overheat/shut down on me, nor has it been a recurring complaint on the forum. Do you have a 2nd Pi you can replicate this issue with?

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Uhm. Why is this cronjob feature for thumbnails not included by default in nextcloud that would be nice!

Furthermore, creating thumbnails on my desktop pc is much faster (thumbnails via Linux nautilus) than my server running nextcloud (which is btw not running on a Raspberry Pi or banana pi). I don’t know why creating thumbs are so slow…? Any idea? Does it create thumbnails via multiple cores /processes? I got a 4 core amd in my server. Or uses it the gpu? The server and desktop specs are very similar except gpu…

Do you have any resources/links I can follow to get the photo preview generator up and running?

I don’t have another pi but planning to get one for testing purposes

Here’s the app:

Here’s a thread discussing it:

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I did some google research on that matter and I found this issue in nextcloud-snap github
On demand thumbnail/preview generation crashes Nextcloud Box #304
Which tells me that, for the time being, I cannot view huge photos folder and it will always result in a crash.

The nextcloud-snap, which comes with the nextcloud box, goal is to provide a standard nextcloud experience and it will inherit the common issues nextcloud has, nextcloud galllary not being able to stand huge photos folder is one of them.

I’ve read somewhere that this issue could be resolved in nextcloud 12 with Preview generator but not in nextcloud 11, which we nextcloud-snap users have at the moment.

However, on the bright side, I am able to view all the photos on my laptop using KDE image viewer “Gwenview” without bringing the box to its knees. Slow but works. Surprisingly, it doesn’t abuse the ram at all

Cheers