web gui ncp - greyed -

AlexNC · February 24, 2025, 9:41am

Good morning,

My issue is with the Nextcloud Pi page at https://myhost i:4443. It remains shaded in gray, continuously loading.

This happened after migrating from an SD card to a USB SSD on a Raspberry Pi 4.

Let me take a step back:
Previously, Nextcloud Pi was running perfectly with the system booting from the SD card, while data and the database were stored on an external hard drive. I then decided to move the boot process to a new USB SSD.

I prepared backups of the data (both a full backup and one without data) and also backed up the Nextcloud Pi configuration, all stored on the external hard drive. Then, I installed a fresh image of Nextcloud Pi v1.55.3 on the new SSD to perform a clean installation.

Nextcloud Pi boots from the new SSD, I can access it via the browser, and I first restore the configuration backup, then restore the data backup. Once the backup process is complete, Nextcloud asks to update and restarts normally.

However, Nextcloud Pi remains accessible but stuck on a gray screen with a spinning loading wheel. I can still use Nextcloud Pi via SSH with ncp-config, which works fine, but I cannot access it through the web GUI.

I hope I have provided enough details. If I can attach any useful logs or reports, please let me know.

Thank you for your support.

Some info

The Basics

Nextcloud Server version (e.g., 29.x.x):
- `Nextcloud Hub 9 (30.0.6)
Operating system and version (e.g., Ubuntu 24.04):
- Linux 6.6.45-current-bcm2711 aarch64 - bookwork
Web server and version (e.g, Apache 2.4.25):
- 2.4.62
PHP version (e.g, 8.3):
- 8.3.12
Is this the first time you’ve seen this error? (Yes / No):
- yes
When did this problem seem to first start?
- after a migration to a new image of ncp
Installation method (e.g. AlO, NCP, Bare Metal/Archive, etc.)
- ncp
Are you using CloudfIare, mod_security, or similar? (Yes / No)
- no

Summary of the issue you are facing:

[…]

Steps to replicate it (hint: details matter!):

Install ncp from image
restore back up

Log entries

Nextcloud

no error. Green flag

PASTE HERE

Web Browser

from console:

la risorsa con indirizzo “https://myhost:4443/js/minified.js”, precaricata con “link preload”, non è stata utilizzata entro un intervallo di alcuni secondi. Assicurarsi che tutti gli attributi del tag preload siano impostati correttamente. 192.168.0.105:4443

La risorsa con indirizzo “https://myhost:4443/js/ncp.js”, precaricata con “link preload”, non è stata utilizzata entro un intervallo di alcuni secondi. Assicurarsi che tutti gli attributi del tag preload siano impostati correttamente. 192.168.0.105:4443

La risorsa con indirizzo “https://myhost4443/img/ncp-logo.svg”, precaricata con “link preload”, non è stata utilizzata entro un intervallo di alcuni secondi. Assicurarsi che tutti gli attributi del tag preload siano impostati correttamente…

PASTE

Web server / Reverse Proxy

The output of your Apache/nginx/system log in /var/log/____:

PASTE HERE

Configuration

NextcloudPi version v1.55.3
NextcloudPi image
OS Armbian-unofficial 24.8.2 Bookworm \l . 6.6.45-current-bcm2711 (aarch64)
automount yes
USB devices sda sdb
datadir /media/ea838ca6-d0f7-4541-be67-3a26e15220b8/ncdata/data
data in SD no
data filesystem ext2/ext3
data disk usage 785G/1.8T
rootfs usage 11G/218G
swapfile /media/USBdrive/swap
dbdir /var/lib/mysql
Nextcloud check ok
Nextcloud version 30.0.6.2
HTTPD service up
PHP service up
MariaDB service up
Redis service up
HPB service down
Postfix service up
Internet check ok
Public IPv4 REMOVED SENSITIVE VALUE
Public IPv6 REMOVED SENSITIVE VALUE
Port 80 closed
Port 443 closed
IP REMOVED SENSITIVE VALUE
Gateway REMOVED SENSITIVE VALUE
Interface end0
Certificates REMOVED SENSITIVE VALUE
NAT loopback no
Uptime 14:52

Nextcloud

it works

![Schermata del 2025-02-24 10-32-07|690x342](upload://ArMDhWiYriz2EHDxAFlSuJWa5EJ.png)

geoW · February 24, 2025, 10:40am

Keep in mind new ncp setups are armbian based.
Check if armbian-config, is installed on your system.
Do armbian-upgrade.

pi@ncpi4:~$ php -i

phpinfo()
PHP Version => 8.3.17

System => Linux ncpi4 6.6.63-current-bcm2711 #1 SMP PREEMPT Wed Nov 27 10:28:46 UTC 2024 aarch64
Build Date => Feb 15 2025 09:04:04
Build System => Linux
Server API => Command Line Interface
Virtual Directory Support => disabled
Configuration File (php.ini) Path => /etc/php/8.3/cli
Loaded Configuration File => /etc/php/8.3/cli/php.ini
Scan this dir for additional .ini files => /etc/php/8.3/cli/conf.d
Additional .ini files parsed => /etc/php/8.3/cli/conf.d/10-mysqlnd.ini,
/etc/php/8.3/cli/conf.d/10-opcache.ini,
/etc/php/8.3/cli/conf.d/10-pdo.ini,
/etc/php/8.3/cli/conf.d/15-xml.ini,
/etc/php/8.3/cli/conf.d/20-bcmath.ini,
/etc/php/8.3/cli/conf.d/20-bz2.ini,
/etc/php/8.3/cli/conf.d/20-calendar.ini,
/etc/php/8.3/cli/conf.d/20-ctype.ini,
/etc/php/8.3/cli/conf.d/20-curl.ini,
/etc/php/8.3/cli/conf.d/20-dom.ini,
/etc/php/8.3/cli/conf.d/20-exif.ini,
/etc/php/8.3/cli/conf.d/20-ffi.ini,
/etc/php/8.3/cli/conf.d/20-fileinfo.ini,
/etc/php/8.3/cli/conf.d/20-ftp.ini,
/etc/php/8.3/cli/conf.d/20-gd.ini,
/etc/php/8.3/cli/conf.d/20-gettext.ini,
/etc/php/8.3/cli/conf.d/20-gmp.ini,
/etc/php/8.3/cli/conf.d/20-iconv.ini,
/etc/php/8.3/cli/conf.d/20-igbinary.ini,
/etc/php/8.3/cli/conf.d/20-imagick.ini,
/etc/php/8.3/cli/conf.d/20-intl.ini,
/etc/php/8.3/cli/conf.d/20-ldap.ini,
/etc/php/8.3/cli/conf.d/20-mbstring.ini,
/etc/php/8.3/cli/conf.d/20-mysqli.ini,
/etc/php/8.3/cli/conf.d/20-pdo_mysql.ini,
/etc/php/8.3/cli/conf.d/20-phar.ini,
/etc/php/8.3/cli/conf.d/20-posix.ini,
/etc/php/8.3/cli/conf.d/20-readline.ini,
/etc/php/8.3/cli/conf.d/20-shmop.ini,
/etc/php/8.3/cli/conf.d/20-simplexml.ini,
/etc/php/8.3/cli/conf.d/20-sockets.ini,
/etc/php/8.3/cli/conf.d/20-sysvmsg.ini,
/etc/php/8.3/cli/conf.d/20-sysvsem.ini,
/etc/php/8.3/cli/conf.d/20-sysvshm.ini,
/etc/php/8.3/cli/conf.d/20-tokenizer.ini,
/etc/php/8.3/cli/conf.d/20-xmlreader.ini,
/etc/php/8.3/cli/conf.d/20-xmlwriter.ini,
/etc/php/8.3/cli/conf.d/20-xsl.ini,
/etc/php/8.3/cli/conf.d/20-zip.ini,
/etc/php/8.3/cli/conf.d/25-redis.ini

PHP API => 20230831
PHP Extension => 20230831
Zend Extension => 420230831
Zend Extension Build => API420230831,NTS
PHP Extension Build => API20230831,NTS
Debug Build => no
Thread Safety => disabled
Zend Signal Handling => enabled
Zend Memory Manager => enabled
Zend Multibyte Support => provided by mbstring
Zend Max Execution Timers => disabled
IPv6 Support => enabled
DTrace Support => disabled

Registered PHP Streams => https, ftps, compress.zlib, php, file, glob, data, http, ftp, compress.bzip2, phar, zip
Registered Stream Socket Transports => tcp, udp, unix, udg, ssl, tls, tlsv1.0, tlsv1.1, tlsv1.2, tlsv1.3
Registered Stream Filters => zlib.*, string.rot13, string.toupper, string.tolower, convert.*, consumed, dechunk, bzip2.*, convert.iconv.*

This program makes use of the Zend Scripting Language Engine:
Zend Engine v4.3.17, Copyright (c) Zend Technologies
    with Zend OPcache v8.3.17, Copyright (c), by Zend Technologies

AlexNC · February 24, 2025, 11:01am

thanks for your reply.
The system I came from was Nextcloud-pi running on Debian, where I made all the backups. The new system is Armbian, and this is where I performed the import and restore. Wasn’t this the correct procedure?

But now, considering that Nextcloud on port 443 is working like a charm and I don’t want to touch it, is there a way to restore only the NCP-web part?

geoW · February 24, 2025, 11:23am

Imho it is ok. But take my remarks as reminder, armbian is now on the playfield. If you install armbian-config you get a nice staring screen if you ssh into the server, security updates and php updates are now done with arnbian-upgrade, networking is done with other tools and so on, some thing behave diiferent than one one was used to.
But if your instance behaves ok, I would not mind about pi`4443 webui, as I refer ncp-config anyway.

AlexNC · February 24, 2025, 1:50pm

Yes, I had thought the same, and I will continue to keep it that way. In the meantime, though, deep debugging.

Markus_M · February 26, 2025, 2:36pm

sound’s a bit like "Something went wrong. Try refreshing the page"

AlexNC · February 26, 2025, 2:58pm

mmm …not sure about it. It looks like a javascript problem or socket connection …
The console of browser is clean

AlexNC · March 20, 2025, 8:39am

The problem remains even after the recent update 30.0.8

AlexNC · May 5, 2025, 8:25am

Update on the issue, but unfortunately no good news.
I did a clean installation from scratch. During the initial stages, the admin panel was accessible as expected. From there, I proceeded to import the NCP configuration backups, the database, and used rsync to recover all my data. Everything went smoothly, and within a few hours, the Nextcloud instance was up and running again. I manually installed two required packages: php8.3-imagick and ffmpeg.
The next day, the same issue happened again: the gray screen with the admin panel on port 4443 not loading. I really don’t understand what’s going on.

AlexNC · May 14, 2025, 12:24pm

I managed to resolve the gray screen issue in the NCP web panel by manually truncating the /var/log/ncp.log file. We discovered that the log had grown excessively large—several megabytes—and that was likely overloading the web UI, causing rendering issues (e.g., oversized DOM trees and stalled interface loads).

After truncating ncp.log, the web panel immediately returned to normal functionality.

Since then, logrotate has been keeping the file under control, rotating it daily when it reaches around 700 KB. This contains the problem and prevents the gray screen from returning.

However, the root issue still remains:
ncp.log grows by ~700 KB every single day, which seems excessive for a typical setup.

Even though log rotation is working properly now, the size and verbosity of the log still cause a noticeable slowdown when performing actions in the NCP web interface.

I believe the next step should be to investigate why ncp.log is so heavily populated and which components or scripts are generating such a high volume of log entries—many of which may be repetitive or not critical.

New Finding: `memories_planet_geometry` SQL logs

Digging into the content of previous logs, we discovered that a huge chunk of the daily log growth is caused by large SQL INSERT statements like this one:

INSERT INTO `memories_planet_geometry` VALUES (...)

This seems to originate from the Memories app, which processes images and videos (including geolocation data). These queries contain massive geometry data and are being logged in full, likely due to overly verbose logging settings or output redirection from background jobs.

This alone could explain the hundreds of KB written daily to ncp.log.

web gui ncp - greyed -

The Basics

Summary of the issue you are facing:

Steps to replicate it (hint: details matter!):

Log entries

Nextcloud

Web Browser

Web server / Reverse Proxy

Configuration

Nextcloud

New Finding: memories_planet_geometry SQL logs

New Finding: `memories_planet_geometry` SQL logs