does anyone have some tips & tricks on how to optimise Nextcloud installation for better performance, perhaps some server-side tweaks can improve things a bit also?
I have one running in a small VM (4 GB ram) and it's OK for what it is, but yeah that initial loading delay is very noticeable ..
So much depends on your use case. Can you say more about that? And what have you already tried? I'm skeptical their server-side tuning suggestions will improve your "initial loading delay" depending on what that means exactly. If you mean you see a slow cold cache page load of the Files app web UI (or any Nextcloud app, really) then I'd say that's common with many complex JS-heavy web apps, including Nextcloud.
FWIW, my Nextcloud web UI seems as fast as I'd expect. Roughly 5sec to load the Files app completely in Firefox (logged-in & warm cache) and this is roughly the same time Google Drive takes to do the same thing! Navigating folders actually feels faster in Nextcloud Files.
I'm not using the web UI except when I have to. I do as much as possible locally (e.g. editing docs, contacts/calendars/tasks). I mostly use Nextcloud for mobile and desktop file/calendar/contacts/photo/notes/tasks sync & share and it seems to do quite well at this. Server-side I did spend a lot of time tuning at first, but it has been stable for years once I got it to a good place.
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On the other hand, in 99.99% of web applications you do not need self baked concurrency. Instead use a queue system which handles this. I've used this with 20 million background jobs per day without hassles, it scales very well horizontally und vertically.
I literally explained why this is not the case.
And Nextcloud being slow in general is not a new complaint from users.
I would assume that the people for whom a slow web based calendar is a problem (among other slow things on the web interface) are people who want to be using it if it performed well.
They wouldn't just make a bad slow web interface on purpose to enlighten people as to how bad web interfaces are, as a complicated way of pushing them toward integrated apps.
Nextcloud provides all 3 in a package that pretty much just works, in my experience (despite being kinda slow).
The Notes app is a pretty nice wrapper around a specific folder full of markdown files, I mostly use it on my phone, and on my desktop I just use my favorite editor to poke at the .md files directly.
Oh, and when a friend group wanted a better way to figure out which day to get together, I just installed the Polls app with a few clicks and we use that now.
I am a bit disappointed in the performance, but I've been running this setup for years and it "just works" for me. I understand how it works, I know how to back it up (and, more importantly restore from that backup!)
If there's another open-source, self-hosted project that has WebDAV, CalDAV, and CardDAV all in one package, then I might consider switching, but for now Nextcloud is "good enough" for me.
We had a similar situation with some notebooks running in production, which were quite slow to load because it was loading a lot of JS files / WASM for the purposes of showing the UI. This was not part of our core logic, and using a CDN to load these, but still relying on private prod instance for business logic helped significantly.
I have a feeling this would be helpful here as well.