I’ve been on the hunt for a Google Keep replacement and the most obvious choice is Quillpad. However it can only sync with Nextcloud and that functionality is somewhat broken. For example, if I create a To Do list in Quillpad, I can of course check the boxes as items are completed. I can do the same in the Nextcloud instance under Tasks. But if I create a To Do list in Nextcloud, you cannot interact with them in Quillpad after it syncs. They’re displayed, but you can’t do anything with them.
All that said, the other choices were Zoho Notebooks (don’t trust them) and Carnet (weirdly slow on my phone) as far as similar apps. Quillpad still seems to be the best. Is there a way to get an app that only syncs with Nextcloud to sync with something else? DavX, Webdav, Caldav, etc? The reason I ask is because I wanted to like Nextcloud, but my admittedly older server (HP Microserver G8) struggles even with the optimized builds and it just has way more features than I need. I have a feeling the answer is no, but thought I’d ask anyway before I continue my hunt.
Eh, my gen8 is chugging happily along with Nextcloud, Synapse, Jellyfin and friends, docker-mailserver, a GoToSocial instance, Home Assistant in a VM, and so on. I don’t know what else is running on your server (and, admittedly, I’ve added some RAM and stuck in a somewhat beefier Xeon CPU), but it should have no problems running a web app like Nextcloud, especially if you stay away from the more intensive stuff like office apps.
That aside, I’ve gone through a fair amount of note taking apps, and so far I like Joplin best, too bad it doesn’t seem to work out for you. Not sure when you last checked out the Android app, but I do know there’s been some changes in the editor it uses recently-ish, it might be worth it to check again.
Yeah, I upgraded my CPU and RAM as well (mentioned in another comment) and even stopped other containers and its still slow.
I tried the Joplin app again yesterday, same thing on the list/Todo view. You can change the editor font but that doesn’t help tiny font on the rendered note.
Let’s dig into performance a bit. Your gen8 server i believe is using E5-26xx CPUs which is plenty of power for speedy performance in Nextcloud. You mentioned upgrading the CPUs and RAM so should be good to go.
With all of that working correctly, Nextcloud is very performant on my comparable Dell R720.
Edit, I see below you are on a microserver. I think all of the above still applies but I don’t have any experience with that hardware. I would still expect it possible to perform well on that device.
I’ve put a Xeon E3-1265v2, which was already quite the upgrade over the dual core Xeon it came with. And then added another 8GB of RAM for total of 16GB. I have 2x1TB SSDs as my cache drive pool and 3x14TB HDD as my array (1 parity). Running Unraid as the OS. I installed the official Nextcloud docker first and had the app files on the SSD as recommended by you as well as the template itself. I also attempted the official AIO docker which includes everything including “High performance backend for Nextcloud, Talk and TURN-server”. I opted out of Office, Talk, and ClamAV on the AIO install as well as disabling apps within NC that I won’t use like their garbage photos app and Deck, for example. There are a few others I just won’t use. And it still runs poorly. Perhaps we have different opinions regarding acceptable wait times for certain tasks. But I can say even just testing it with very few items synchronized, there have been several conflicts within Tasks and Notes. I’m talking a half dozen notes and tasks colliding with one another when syncing and throwing errors.
Please understand I mean no one any ill will nor am I trying to disparage Nextcloud as a solution (other than the photos app, lol). And I thought I made it clear that I understood it to be a limitation of my hardware, not the app itself. That said I’ve noticed people get weirdly defensive of Nextcloud anytime someone has any complaints about it. Not just here, but on any forum I’ve searched for solutions or options to help with performance. As if they’re personally invested in the company or something. If it works for those folks, more power to you and I wish you many happy years of service with the app and many 1s and 0s flying back and forth with speed and accuracy. It’s just way more app than I need to run.
No problem at all! I was reluctant to comment as it seemed that you weren’t interested in pursuing Nextcloud any further, but went ahead with my comment because I initially had very poor performance when using the basic container running with SQLITE.
I will admit that I had sync issues with a notes program when putting the file on Nextcloud. Some apps just aren’t compatible with that storage paradigm it would seem.
Thanks for the thoughtful replies and good luck on your search!
These tips are all solid, and reflect my setup. Database (MariaDB) and PHP files on the SSD, data storage on spinny bois. Don’t underestimate the importance of a recent enough version of PHP, OpCache, enabled, and so on.
There’s a whole chapter on performance tuning in the manual, and the “Security & setup warnings” part of the administration settings should point out some configuration issues, when it finds them.
My setup might actually take a (smallish) performance hit because I use btrfs for all my filesystems. Just don’t get roped into the whole “wsl on Windows” thing, that’s just not going to work out, it’s a kludge that MS offers to not bleed users to Linux too much, but it’s certainly not meant for server workloads.
The hardware should not be the bottleneck at all, the 1265 in OPs machine should not be significantly slower than the 1280 in mine.