Understanding and improving Nextcloud Previews

Hi, I have been playing with the preview generation process to try to speed up things for low end devices (mainly for NextCloudPi)

In case you are interested I would love some feedback

https://ownyourbits.com/2019/06/29/understanding-and-improving-nextcloud-previews/

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Thank for sharing your results, it’s really interesting and not only for RPi-users.

I suppose it is not possible to use the raw image when using the max-preview? And only do it for some sort of camera RAW formats that are not directly supported by browsers.

Very interesting! I didn’t know that my preview folder took up over 160GiB until I checked it because of your article.

I would’ve liked to see a comparison of disk usage from your sample data between the default config and your optimized config of the preview generator. Because I don’t really mind the cpu time.

Still an excellent article with obviously a lot of work put into it and a lot of insights given to the reader! Thanks again for that

Thanks @tflidd I assume that the max image is there in case the picture is really big, for instance 20MiB. In that case it would be a waste to send 20MiB to the browser.

That being said, when it’s a reasonable size we could save space by using that one directly, instead of storing an identical copy in the previews folder…

Just wanted to share my experience with nachoparker’s suggested settings

default:

  • runtime: 1d 05:00:13
  • size: 163,32 GiB

optimized settings:

  • runtime: 08:43:50 (single threaded, jpg quality 90)
  • size: 32,95 GiB

In my particular case I save 69,90% cpu time and 79,82% of space with the optimized settings, which i find pretty neat. I can also confirm, that image quality looks nice, as far as i have seen it.

My findings for the default and optimized run are not 100 % comparable because they were done on a production system, but i think they should be good enough. Neither was the cpu blocked by any other process, nor were there major changes to the file system.

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The link now point to a disabled page. :sob:
@nachoparker, is there a way to get back the article ?
This is a great article !

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I am working with my hosting provider to sort out the issue. They were pretty crappy honestly.

the problem is now solved

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@nachoparker I have made a post regarding the jpeg_quality showing that Nextcloud internal preview generation does not use the same setting as previewgenerator for jpeg_quality. Would you care to comment on that?

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website is down again. Any forum where you’ve put it on?

Ownyourbits is deader than dead for sometime now. Here you go:

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