TrueNas Scale Nextcloud performance

Hi All,

I am very new and trying to learn how to set up nextcloud on a truenas scale. I have truenas running and a nextcloud instance running on my machine. I backed up my phone and saw the performance was very bad when i’m retrieving my photos on my iphone. I looked at the dashboard on the truenas and saw that my machine only had 0.7 GB or ram that wasn’t being used. So without researching I thought increasing the ram capacity would help. I upgraded to 32gb 1600 DDR3 ECC memory and started up the machine . Now when I try to retrieve pictures on phone my machine get pegged at almost at 100% cpu usage. I have a E3 1220 V2. Its only a 4 core CPU.
Then I researched online for what the issue might be and came across someone mentioning the same issue I have. They mentioned an app called preview Generator.

  1. install preview generator from next cloud web interface - was able to do without any issues.
  2. configure using putty. I could not get putty running as root because it says access denied. I was able to log in as root using the web interface for truenas.
  3. Then I found a video on youtube and tried to follow the steps. I logged into truenas as root. opened a pod shell for nextcloud and tried running the commands in the video:
  4. apt install libreoffice libreoffice-l10n-de libreoffice-help-de ( I was able to run this on pod shell)
  5. apt install ffmpeg imagemagick ghostscript ( I was able to run this on pod shell)
  6. cd /var/www/nextcloud/ ( i was not able to into that folder as it does not exist
    I also get a /bin/sh: 4: cant’s cd to /local

If anyone can point me in the right direction or instructions on how to get preview generator running on a truenas scale machine running nextcloud.

Thanks in advance.

Running apt is not a supported use case for a nextcloud app on TrueNAS. It may break on update. The only supported usage is through their webapp gui. They wont block you from doing it but you must understand that this will likely break after an update in the future. As Wendell puts it: TrueNAS doesnt like you coloring outside their lines. If you want to have access to a proper command line, might as well install nextcloud under a VM+Ubuntu Server instead of a straight up TrueNAS application.

I am at this point where I am considering breaking apart Nextcloud functionality into separate discrete apps on TrueCharts.

Are you working with encrypted volumes by chance, either through Nextcloud or FreeNAS? That plugin is not compatible with those so that might be the issue.

Would you recommend me switching to unraid or use truenas with vm running Ubuntu server?

No. The volumes are not encrypted.

I know I’m jumping on someone else’s suggestion, but I’d use Docker instead of a VM. It’s much more efficient, but still confined. I’m using Linuxserver’s Nextcloud Docker image and it’s pretty great, almost no settings required to make it work.

Try that and see if you have the same issues.

I have yet to try Unraid or Nextcloud in a VM.

Personally, I’d probably try the VM+Ubuntu server, It could run on just 1 core especially if you only have a handful of users. The problem is you add additional complications with how Nextcloud handles disk capacities and disk usage.

Best ask other/wait for other people to reply in the forum.

It will work but I’ve heard you may have issues if you ever decide to rollback updates (for whatever reason/s).

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Never had to rollback it ever really, but if you update the image through the updater is possible to roll it back through the same tool.

To be fair, I never had to rollback mine too.

Thanks for your help. I’m going try Ubuntu vm running free nas. I’ll see if that will work. I will also try to run a docker image. And see which one is better for my use case.

Thanks

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