I am trying out Joplin as a replacement for Evernote, and many things look fine. But there are two large potential drawbacks. The smaller, though perhaps more irritating, is that I have a couple of Zapier scripts that only work with Evernote to do things like harvest tweets I have liked. I can work around that.
Much more serious is the dreadful sync performance. As an intermittent user of EN for nearly 20 years I have around 5,000 notes collected. As I write they are syncing to Nextcloud on a raspberry pi at a rate of around 100 an hour -- so it will take two days and nights to upload them -- and presumably the same amount of time to sync them onto any other device I use. That's just farcical.
I tried syncing on dropbox first and that appeared to be even slower.
Meanwhile, I see from the forum that onedrive has huge problems too at the moment.
So is there any syncing solution that works for serious, professional use? Something that takes, let's say, an hour for a full sync of 5,000 notes. Obviously I would expect and need the delta syncs to work very much quicker.
I sync nearly 10,000 items in less than one hour on Nextcloud, and a lot less on Joplin Server, so there might be something off either with your server or connection. 100 an hour makes not sense at all unless each note is 1GB in size.
It may be that a raspberry Pi 4 is too feeble for the task. It really isn't the problem that the notes are too large; I backed up everything before starting, and the raw Joplin directory is 1.8gb
Yes perhaps you are hitting a limit of the Pi 4, either due to the way Joplin syncs, or the way Nextcloud read/write data. I don't know the spec of my server, I use a basic VPS at OVH (not the lowest spec, but the second lowest one).
I'm running Apache, MariaDB, PHP with Nextcloud on a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB. It was a Pi4 4GB and that worked fine as well. The Pi / Nextcloud is accessible from the Internet but when a device is on my local network my DNS Server (Pi-Hole) sends the URL for the Nextcloud server straight to its 192.168.x.x address. This removes the need to go out to the Internet and back again and so, being a Pi4, the transfers are at gigabit speeds.
hmm. I can't remember how much memory this Pi4 has got. I run it headless and always have so I may have got the 2GB version. But I am also connecting directly on my local network so that won't be what's slowing it down. Been running for two and a half hours now, and 1200 notes synched. So it's getting faster!
Also Nextcloud can be configured either with database cache (by default), or with Redis cache, so perhaps it's matter of switching to Redis instead of the default?
If you have access logs on your server you could check how long it takes for it to respond. And then see whether it's the server that is responding slowly or something on Joplin side.
I think the problem may be sluggish storage. I have ordered a new SSD and will see if that makes the difference. Because other people clearly aren't having my experience.
After much faffing -- reinstalling nextcloud, trying a Docker image instead of a snap, trying to use another storage medium -- I think that part of the problem at least is that webdav is naturally slow with masses of small files, which of course a Joplin installation is. So I thought I would do the original sync by copying everything up to the nextcloud by some faster method like scp and then scanning the uploaded files into the nextcloud database. I was inspired to this by someone who got their dropbox sync under way by making a local copy of the file on their phone and then syncing to that, as a file, before changing the mechanism to syncing online. But dropbox now requires a paid account to make offline copies.
If I do this, what should I upload or copy for the first, big sync?
In other words, which files does the sync process copy over? The whole Joplin datadir?
do a local folder sync and upload the local folder to cloud service manually;
configure Joplin to use cloud service and do a full sync (not special, just Ctrl+S);
From my experience Step 2 is painfully slow fro my 2000+notes and resources (hours or a whole night for onedrive), and from then on the delta sync speed is really fast when I create or edit something in Joplin.
I recently moved from OneDrive to my Synology NAS WebDAV, and everything works fine.
I just synced to a usb hard disk and for the first time the whole sync completed. It took around two hours for 11,000 items created. It now seems to be starting all over again although I have done no more than rename one note and fiddle with a new one. If this is the fastest form of sync available Joplin is completely unusable in any professional context. There are lots of things I love about the program but the ability to keep notes in sync and available on whatever device I am using is vital and just seems to be missing.
Not sure why everything's so slow about everything you're using to be honest. 11,000 items is nothing and would sync in 10 min from a local hard-drive.
Admittedly, the folder is about twice the size I thought it was, but still ...
Perhaps a clean reinstallation of Joplin will help, now that I have the directory backed up.
. I wonder if it the age of my desktop. Now that I have the whole thing synced (I think) onto the detachable hard drive, can I plug that into a macbook, and sync a new installation from it?
And can I then copy over the synced directory into my nextcloud installation, scan the files into nc, and then try syncing with that?
