Why do updates take so long?

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Nextcloud version (eg, 20.0.5): 20.0.9
Operating system and version (eg, Ubuntu 20.04): Debian 11
Apache or nginx version (eg, Apache 2.4.25): Apache
PHP version (eg, 7.4): PHP 7.4

The issue you are facing:

Is this the first time you’ve seen this error? (Y/N): N

I rent a (small) VPS at Hetzner and have been using Nexcloud along with an Email server on it for around 3 years.

Steps to replicate it:

  1. Run my daily backup, including a tar of the /etc/www/nextcloud folder → takes less than 5 minutes
  2. Start the update (e.g. from 24.0.9 to 24.0.10): cd /var/www/nextcloud/updater && sudo -u www-data php updater.phar
  3. Third step “Create backup” takes several hours (at the moment already 5 hours)
  4. Step 6 “Extracting” usually also takes a long time

If there is no network issue, the update is successful, however I don’t understand why it takes so much time! 7 hours today…

Is this a normal behavior? Is there a way to speed up the process, for example by skipping the backup step? I’m always backing up the nextcloud folder and make a database dump before updating.

1 Like

Unfortunately I don’t know why it takes so long for you. For me the hole upgrade procedure only takes a few minutes, but yes, you can skip step 3 by using the --no-backup option:

sudo -u www-data php /path/to/nextcloud/updater/updater.phar --no-backup
1 Like

Same for me, the nextcloud update is always very long (several hours) because of the step “create backup” and I don’t understand why.

Do you have shell access? With the command

ncdu

you can find the biggest folders. Maybe there are a lot of unused files. Sometimes there is a backup in a backup backuped. :wink:

Look in your backup structure /path/to/nextcloud/data/updater-***/backups . Post details.

The process taking hours is a bit strange. Can you check the system usage the next time, is it CPU, memory, i/o operations that are the limiting factor?