Hi everyone,
I'm experimenting with ownCloud as a way to collect and distribute data
from remote scientific instruments back to the other scientists at our
company. The idea is that each instrument will have it's own account.
The data folder for the instrument can be shared out to the individuals
needing access to the data. It's a lot of data, so not all of them will
want the data streaming in from multiple instruments filling up their
hard drives. As a result they are likely to interact with the data via
the web interface.
I currently have an instrument set up that is generating about 130 MB an
hour of data and uploading it to our ownCloud server. That part is
working well. What isn't working well is the performance of the web
interface in dealing with large numbers of large text files.
I'm running the community edition of ownCloud 8.1.4 on CentOS 7 built as
a virtual machine. The data is not stored on the virtual disk with the
OS and ownCloud. Instead, I have a 2 TB array available on a different
machine that is shared to the ownCloud system via NFS. (This will
eventually change so that we mount a local disk from the storage array
hosting the virtual machines.)
So here is the situation that's giving me some problems.
First, if I select multiple files, say 11 at a time, and delete them, it
takes a minute and 10-15 seconds for the action to complete. That seems
really long to me. Users are likely to grow impatient. I tried
deleting 18 files once, but the interface just seemed to freeze and
wouldn't respond to any actions. To be fair, I think that I missed the
little checkbox in the corner of the icon when trying to select the last
file. The web interface may have been trying to open the file instead.
Which brings me to the second issue. If you accidentally try to open a
130 MB text file via a web browser, the interface just comes to a
screeching halt. If you are extremely patient, the file will eventually
open after several minutes. Like about 10 minutes or so. I don't know
exactly because gave up timing it. The interface doesn't give you any
feedback about what is happening or a way to cancel the action or even
respond to any other interactions. It just appears to freeze. When I
inadvertently tried to open one of these files in the web browser in
front of one of the scientists, he got a look of disgust and sneered
that it seemed really slow. I tried to explain that it was transferring
130 MB of data and formatting it into html, but that is not a very
satisfying excuse. Heck, I know what's going on and it's still irksome
to me.
So, are there ways to improve the performance?
We have been using ownCloud for the past couple of years on a limited
basis. I just thought that we could expand the usage to a wider group.
Now I'm not so sure. Is anyone else using it in a similar fashion? Do
you have any best practices recommendations?
Fred Bacon
Senior Scientist
Aerodyne Research, Inc.
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