Server requirements question

Hello everybody,

Now that Nextcloud 11 has been released, I’ve decided it is time to take my files down from my 1and1 hosted domain to a personally owned server. This week, I got Nextcloud running on a Raspberry Pi B+ (700mhz CPU, 512mb RAM); however, it is horrendously slow. I have two upgrade options: a) purchase a Raspberry Pi 3 (1.2ghz quad core, 1gb ram, 10/100Mbps max LAN speed, $50), or b) build a simple server (3.6ghz dual core, 4gb ram, 10/100/1000Mbps max LAN speed, $160). Will either of these two configurations be sufficient to run Nextcloud smoothly? Would the simple server build be a sufficient performance improvement to warrant a ~$100 price bump?

Thank you.

Would opt for the simple server. The main issue with the pi is the slow I/O which is what you don’t want when syncing files. In addition faster hardware is always more flexible and 160€ seems very cheap

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Depends what you plan to do. If you mainly want to sync your calendar and contacts and a few files for a single user, a RPi3 can be sufficient. It should be clearly faster than older RPi. However, it is still not very powerful, network speed and disk-speed are limited. Syncing many files with many clients is a problem. Also, it’s a 32-bit platform, so no files larger than 4 GB (or 2 GB?) can be synced, and limited resources require good configuration and tuning of the system.

I intend to hold quite a large number of files on the device… would the
server setup I listed be sufficient?

Then go for the server. The given specifications should be quite good for a start. And check if you have the possibility to buy more RAM at a later time.