this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2023
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Hi Guys. Currently, my Raspberry Pi 4 is only running Home Assistant OS, which works quite well. In the last few weeks, I have grown more and more interested in paperless ngx and Nextcloud. Do you think my pi would be able to handle home automation and some light document management simultaneously? If so, should I install a fresh version of Raspbian or let HA-OS handle the Docker containers?

Thanks for your answers, and have a wonderful day :)

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It's probably going to be ok to scope them out and experiment a bit, but I doubt you'll get enough performance and stability to run it as production. Paperless' OCR is quite heavy on the CPU - iirc you can disable it but then you lose half of what makes it useful, and Nextcloud also does some processing to files that are uploaded to it. Since you are not running pi-hole or other latency-sensitive services it will probably be fine, it will just get sluggish while it processes uploads.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

While paperless processing is indeed quite intensive, it's not like this is a latency-sensitive task. If it takes 5m to OCR a scan, so be it. That doesn't make it unusably slow.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What I meant is that overloading the CPU on a Raspberry running pi-hole will make the whole network misbehave and timeout, until DNS requests are able to be serviced again. But since they're not doing that it should be fine :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It's there any way around this? I don't want my smart home applications to run sluggish. They need to have priority.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I would say not in a way that makes sense, there may be hacky workarounds like setting nice priorities or messing around with scheduling, but there's no way around hardware limitations. The Pi's CPU, RAM, and IO bandwidth are what they are, and you need overhead to guarantee "snappiness"

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is what the nice command is for

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Scheduling priority on Linux is borderline broken. Nice doesn't even do anything noticeable on modern systems.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Nextcloud will be slow. To be realistic is it always slow in all hardware.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It will be slow on the Pi, but it's pretty darned fast on my new DIY NAS with a Ryzen 5600x so it does scale with better hardware.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sure it is... especially when you start to have tons of JavaScript erros in your browser console :D Now seriously, have a look at this: https://lemmy.world/comment/346174

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Eh, every page has a bunch of Javascript errors and logs. That's normal. So far it hasn't impacted my usage at all and I've got 450GB gigabytes stored in a Nextcloud instance that's lasted 4-years and migrated between 3 separate machines.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That’s normal

Ahaha. The current state of software development and what people accept as normal is just mind-boggling. And no, it's not "normal" nor "ok", it slows down things and the UI sometimes crashes with more data.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I take it you've never seen the amount of crap that gets put into journalctl then. I've never encountered a Nextcloud crash with the amount of data I have. It could have been a deployment issue on your end. My docker containers have been running fine.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I tired bare metal and docker, it’s shit and I’m not the only one complaining so I’ll assume you’ve been lucky so far. Either way you can’t deny that the UI is a piece of crap and my “personal favorite” is the webmail UI that can’t even WYSIWYG properly.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's been 4 years, that's one hell of a lucky streak. Eh, the UI is fine, way better than syncthing's anyways and its client has working partial sync. I get that you have hate for Nextcloud, but personally I am not about the mess of disparate tools in your post just to get something equivalent to Nextcloud tbh. To each their own.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Well partial sync is the only thing you can say that is an advantage... but frankly you can emulate with in Syncthing with exclusion patterns. I "hate" Nextcloud because it eventually failed in all deploys I made with it. They don't even get right a simple WYSIWYG editor. As I said before I re-try Nextcloud from time to time, and I would love very much to see it succeed and replace all the other tools I use, but it doesn't deliver on the promise. At least not for the numbers of users I have.

What logic does it have to advertise your solution as an alternative to MS365 / Google Workplace if they can't even deliver a properly working and useful webmail? The WYSIWYG is broken, you can't resize the window to make it bigger and some other annoying details. And then there are always constant complaints of others about losing all data on upgrades (I haven't experienced this but still).

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Can always get a NUC or another Pi.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (3 children)

DIdn’t Intel stop making NUCs?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Intel did but believe they are being made (MSI et )

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

They did, which is a huge shame. You can get equivalent mini PCs from vendors like Minisforum tho.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes but you can find old hardware for sale too. Another alternative are the micro form factor Dell Optiplex PCs.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I run nextcloud with two 6TB drives on a core2 quad optiplex with 4gb of ram. Runs like a dream. I say start on the pi and migrate to something faster if you really find you want/need nextcloud.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Ive been running HA (in docker container) and NextCloud on rpi4 4gb and it was working fine, but after server upgrade (diy pc) nextcloud became much more snappy (wasnt my reason to upgrade). Not sure about paperless, but I had many more lightweight services along with HA and NC. Im also not heavy HA or NC user, just my 0.02

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Same here. My old Pi 4, was running HA, Nextcloud, Ghost blog, websites, Jellyfin and a couple of other small things. It did it fine, but when I upgraded to the Odroid H3 it all became so much faster and snappier.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So I should look into hosting docket on my pi and upgrade as soon as I feel like it?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I would, but you have to decide on your own. I dont know can you afford HA downtime, how much experience you have and how much time you want to burn. I found docker frustrating to learn but super rewarding. Keep in mind Im still new.

Its best to backup and/or get spare SD card to learn how to setup everything. Be prepared for begginer mistakes, but once you get familiar a bit it will be much easier.

If you can manage docker containers in HAOS just try it. I have 0 experience with HAOS so cant help much, but I saw Portainer is available as HA addon. You should be able to manage all docker containers with simple Portainer GUI.

I had dietpi or raspbian OS with docker, docker-compose and Portainer installed. Then I started many containers (including HA) using Portainer. If you go this path you will lose HA addons. I believe most addons can be replaced with docker containers from hub.docker.com, but Im not sure about that. Ive just seen some HAOS vs Docker posts

Gl

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
DNS Domain Name Service/System
HA Home Assistant automation software
~ High Availability
NAS Network-Attached Storage
NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers

4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 11 acronyms.

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