- from what I see owncloud is now written in go whereas nextcloud is still PHP. That might give it a performance boost on a raspberry pi (it basically avoids all the overhead from reading and byte-compiling all the PHP files on every request)
There are things that you can do to speed up nextcloud though:
- look into php byte-code caching (opcache and stuff like that)
- make sure your database indexes are set up correctly: I can't remember where in the admin ui (I'm on the phone rn) but there's some sort of self-test/diagnostics page that will tell you about database indexes to create (and the SQL commands to run too, iirc)
- you can tell nextcloud to use a redis for caching too, that could give an additional performance boost
But yeah, again, the raspberry pi isn't really that good for this kind of things. For pretty much the same (total!) Price of a RPI and related accessories I'd get something like a Lenovo m93p tiny off eBay and slap an SSD into that. You'd get proper performance albeit with a higher tdp.
On a whim I tried the vps docker setup on the pi. Runs much smoother (seems like the db was the bottleneck but).
edit: Aaaaaaand now I can't login because I foolishly tried to setup webdav and nextcloud is adding 30 seconds to my login and it never actually cool downs. Why do I even bother.
edit: Aaaaand nextcloudpi is stuck in an endless loop after first login. What was I expecting.
https://help.nextcloud.com/t/docker-install-says-initializin... And I am not the only one. I'll try again in a year or two.
edit2: doesn't explain why owncloud runs smoother than nextcloud though. They must be doing something right.