TLDR: Finally got a big SSD and moved my data storage over to the local file system. It’s fixed all my woes with Preview Generator (no longer crashing and running heaps faster) and no hanging NC server when uploading/syncing lots of files. My NC experience is now excellent!
I’ve been messing around with NC for the past 6 months trying to get a usable experience out of it. My setup has always been NC Docker on my NUC, with my data directory pointing to my NAS storage.
I’ve had constant issues with the server hanging badly when uploading lots of files, accessing lots of files in the NC browser that contain a lot of previews, etc.
I tried to use the Preview Generator plugin to take some of the load off the server during runtime, but it would only ever run for a few minutes before crashing silently. I later found out that was likely due to a PHP memory leak issue.
I finally decided to get a 1TB SSD to install in my NUC and move the data directory over to the NUC’s local storage, and boy has that made me smile.
I’ve now successfully been generating previews for my 200+ GB of content for the past half an hour, and everything in the NC browser is running 20 times faster than it was previously.
So happy I made the plunge. Posting here in case anyone else has been disappointed with any of the above while using a mounted/NAS/external data storage.
System
Intel NUC
Nextcloud 20.0.0.9
Ubuntu 20.04