nextcloud / nextcloud/server

Slow or unreachable federated shares shouldn't slow down NC so much

Open
#30,552 4 comments 5 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

0. Needs triage design enhancement feature: external storage feature: federation feature: files performance 🚀
Dominant language
PHP
Stars
36.9k
Forks
5.2k
Avg merge
2d 3h
Merged PRs (30d)
713

Description

How to use GitHub
  • Please use the 👍 reaction to show that you are interested into the same feature.
  • Please don't comment if you have no relevant information to add. It's just extra noise for everyone subscribed to this issue.
  • Subscribe to receive notifications on status change and new comments.

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
When (especially larger) federated shares from other NC instances are within a directory, loading of the directory content will not terminate before the shared directory is fetched (probably mainly metadata, like size, modified date) as well. This can lead to long loading times, or, in the worst case, timeouts and a blank page.

Describe the solution you'd like
I'd propose the following solution:
Shares could be displayed without metadata. Metadata could be loaded in a subsequent, non-blocking request.

Additional context
I'm currently on NC 22.2.2

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

No files or tests are named. Start by reproducing a directory containing a large or unreachable federated share and trace the directory-loading request to identify where remote metadata blocks completion. Done means the directory can render without waiting for that metadata, with the metadata fetched afterward without blocking the initial request.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
php
Domain
backend, distributed-systems, performance
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
30/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.