Selfhosting on Hetzner CX11 VPS Server

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I would like to install selfhosted ecloud for max 5 persons with onlyoffice on a Hetzner VPS Server CX11 (1 CPU, 2 GB RAM, 20 GB HDD). Could anyone advice what I do have to tweak (e.g. ecloud.cnf or any other file). I’d use Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Data will be stored on a Hetzner StorageBox (1GB), which will be mounted via /etc/fstab as data folder in ecloud.

Also, is it advisable to use a swap file and if so, how large should it be?

Thanks
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2

First, please wait some days before starting the install, NC25 is under testing and should be released soon.
Also, OnlyOffice is no longer supported by Murena. You still can add some office solutions on your own, but there is no way that will fit in a CX11 :confused:

2GB RAM may be not enough, please read requirements here: https://gitlab.e.foundation/e/infra/ecloud-selfhosting#requirements.
Also, as the requirements states, I strongly advise for a minimum of 2 CPU.
CX21 is the best starter choice at Hetzner.

As for tuning, I’d start with official documentation: https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/25/admin_manual/installation/server_tuning.html.
Please be aware that tuning to fit a whole selfhosted in a small box, always comes with a cost on performance and user experience.

As I remember, advised method to use external network storage, by both Nextcloud and Hetzner, may be to use Nextcloud External Storage instead of system mounts.
Also, you may have to check if system mounts will work with Docker volumes, you may have to use a specific driver.

A swap file may be of use, I’d start with a small 1GB and watch the use over a couple of weeks.
The problem here is not only the size, but also how it’s used: as it is “slow memory”, you may be facing problems if there is a lot of swap-in and swap-out moves. In this case you may consider tuning your usage, or adding some real RAM.
There are plenty of guides around about swap tuning.

For your information, this is a test server (no real users) on a CX21:

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You may quickly find that the main memory eager is mailserver. The culprit is clamav, so you may want to build your own image without it :wink:

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NB : this is a test server, no real traffic.

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Sylvain, thank you very much for your reply. Glad to hear NC 25 it’s on its way, as it will bring some nice extra features I hope, especially in photo editing. But it’s a pity that Murena (I assume this does also apply to the self hosted version, which I just refert to as “ecloud”) does no longer support OnlyOffice. Not that I am really into OnlyOffice, but I liked the implemenation, also with the icons ans such. But anyway I will try other solutions and see how this will get. The good thing is that I can install the document server of each app on another VPS Server so that this will not consume too much RAM from my ecloud server.

As for the external storage, I like that my storagebox is my main storage in ecloud and that is only possible if I mount it in fstab as my /data directory. It works fine, I just have to install kernel-extras after each kernel update.

I am not using the mailserver, so turning it off is possibly a way to reduce ram consumption. Could you let me know how I can do that?

As a background info: I still have the old price for my CX11 VPS and as soon as I rescale the new prices will be activated. Therefore I try to stay with CX11 as long as possible.

4

nextcloud can run <2GB memory and 1cpu core with a family amount of devices attached to the dav protocols and still quickly respond. Just make sure to use redis for caching. The box does turn/stun for nextcloud talk too. I think the memory demand in mailserver is due to rspamd building dictionaries. Postfix is lightweight though. Have no experience with Office packages so my advice might not apply. I probably should increase the swap (128m) but then didn’t hurt yet, having none at all would be a problem when memory pressure increases. This isn’t the docker selfhost package though what you see in the screenshot.

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Hetzner also offers storageboxes with hosted nextcloud.

5

It is not advised to take down mailserver container: selfhosted is designed to be a “all-in-a-box” solution.
Instead, you may try to lower it’s memory footprint.

With a freshly started instance, cd /mnt/repo-base then docker stats show:

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Let’s dig into mailserver with docker-compose exec mailserver bash, then top command:

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Easy fix: still in mailserver shell, issue:

  • s6-svc -dwD /services/clamd to stop clamd
  • s6-svc -dwD /services/freshclam to stop it’s associated updater
  • rm -rf /services/clamd to remove service
  • rm -rf /services/freshclam to remove service

Then exit the mailserver shell, then docker-compose restart mailserver to restart the Docker container.

Let’s check:

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75MB instead of 1.3GB, much better! :tada:

:warning: Please be aware that it won’t survive a Docker image pull and/or Docker container re-creation. So it has to be done again at every update/upgrade.
Also, Rspamd may show warnings in it’s log, but they’re harmless (just tested, both ways).

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Thanks, Sylvain, I will try it out.

In the meanwhile I have installed v25 of nextcloud, but I would prefer to use the old logo or at least only the orange murena “e” es logo. Would this be possible?
And is there a way to get the icons once onlyoffice or libreoffice is installed?

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Possible, probably. Easy, not sure: theme and dashboard are bundled into NC25 Docker image…
Unfortunately, I just dropped my test instance :confused:

Not sure to understand this one :confused: What icons is it about?

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What I mean is that I liked the icons for onlyoffice in the murena dashboard, but it seemed they are gone. But that is not really an issue. However, it would be nice if two themes could be implemented, one with murena, and one with the “e” logo.