Opening messages is slow

[ChristophWurst]

Steps to reproduce

1. Open the app
2. Click on a message
3. Click on another message

Expected behavior

Fast switching

Actual behavior

Mediocre to slow switching. HTML messages are worse than plain text messages.

Mail app version

4.0

Nextcloud version

No response

Mailserver or service

No response

Operating system

No response

PHP engine version

None

Nextcloud memory caching

No response

Web server

None

Database

None

Additional info

No response

[9-FS]

This is a huge issue for me. Mails need multiple seconds, sometimes up to 30 s to display. On every other client it's instantaneous.

[ChristophWurst]

Thank you for the feedback, @9-FS. Could you please open the browser developer console, switch to the network tab, reload the page and try to find the specific requests which are slow, if any? That should help narrowing it down.

[solderdev]

FYI - had the same problem both with Nextcloud Mail AND Snappymail.
The cause was a bad DNS configuration:

• Nextcloud running in Docker
• local DNS server (Technitium/Unbound/pihole) running in Docker on the same machine
• Docker internal network: 172.16.0.0
• LAN-IP: 192.168.1.10 --> the local router sets this (server IP) as DNS for all clients in LAN
• Server host-OS and therefore Docker daemon gets it's own IP assigned as DNS server (via DHCP)
• DNS lookup of mailserver-URL from Nextcloud via 192.168 IP fails (something about docker networking)

Solution:
in the docker-compose file of the DNS server, make sure port 53 is bound to the correct host-IP:

ports:
      - 192.168.1.10:53:53/udp
      - 192.168.1.10:53:53/tcp

Could you please check if you run a similar setup?
Easy test: set s/t like 1.1.1.1 as host-OS DNS and restart Docker daemon.

[9-FS]

@ChristophWurst Unfortunately, it's incosistent. The requests that take multiple seconds all have in common that they are all JSON data from Google Mail and are not displayed in a pure text fashion. In contrast, the mails I have imported from my university server seem to be text only and load instantaneously.

@solderdev This is a pretty similar setup to mine, I just have my Technitium DNS server in its own network br0 under 192.168.0.3 and my router advertises that IP to all devices in the network as DNS server. From the console of other containers like Nextcloud, that are in the default bridge network, I've tried some nslookup and ping 192.168.0.3 and they were all instantaneous. I post my docker composes for Technitium and Nextcloud down here just in case it might help.

services:
    technitium:
        container_name: "technitium"
        image: "technitium/dns-server:13.3.0"
        environment:
            HOST_OS: "Unraid"
            TZ: "UTC"
            TCP_PORT_5380: 5380
            UDP_PORT_53: 53
        volumes:
            - "/mnt/user/appdata/technitium/:/etc/dns/:rw"
        user: "99:100"
        networks:
            br0:
                ipv4_address: "192.168.0.3"
                ipv6_address: "fd00::9e6b:ff:fe2e:d542"
        sysctls:
            net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range: "1024 65000"
        restart: "always"
        deploy:
            resources:
                limits:
                    memory: "1G"

networks:
    br0:
        external: true

services:
    mariadb:
        container_name: "nextcloud_mariadb"
        image: "mariadb:11.4.4"
        environment:
            HOST_OS: "Unraid"
            TZ: "UTC"
            # MARIADB_DATABASE: ""
            # MARIADB_PASSWORD: ""
            MARIADB_RANDOM_ROOT_PASSWORD: yes
            MARIADB_USER: "felix"
        env_file: ".env"
        volumes:
            - "/mnt/user/appdata/nextcloud/mariadb/config/:/etc/mysql/conf.d:rw"
            - "/mnt/user/appdata/nextcloud/mariadb/data/:/var/lib/mysql/:rw"
        user: "99:100"
        network_mode: "bridge"
        ports:
            - "3306:3306"
        deploy:
            resources:
                limits:
                    memory: "1G"

    redis:
        container_name: "nextcloud_redis"
        image: "redis:7.4.1"
        environment:
            HOST_OS: "Unraid"
            TZ: "UTC"
        network_mode: "bridge"
        ports:
            - "6379:6379"
        deploy:
            resources:
                limits:
                    memory: "1G"

    nextcloud:
        container_name: "nextcloud"
        image: "nextcloud:30.0.4"
        depends_on:
            - "mariadb"
            - "redis"
        environment:
            HOST_OS: "Unraid"
            TZ: "UTC"
        volumes:
            - "/mnt/user/appdata/dlh_duty_plan_converter/calendar/:/var/www/html/data/files_external/dlh_duty_plan_converter/calendar/:rw"
            - "/mnt/user/appdata/nextcloud/nextcloud/:/var/www/html:rw"
            - "/mnt/user/nextcloud/backup/:/var/www/html/data/files_external/backup/:rw"
            - "/mnt/user/nextcloud/Felix/:/var/www/html/data/Felix/:rw"
            - "/mnt/user/nextcloud/media/:/var/www/html/data/files_external/media/:rw"
        user: "99:100"
        network_mode: "bridge"
        ports:
            - "8666:80"
        deploy:
            resources:
                limits:
                    memory: "1G"

    nextcloud_cronjob_runner:
        container_name: "nextcloud_cronjob_runner"
        image: "rcdailey/nextcloud-cronjob:latest"
        depends_on:
            - "nextcloud"
        environment:
            HOST_OS: "Unraid"
            TZ: "UTC"
            NEXTCLOUD_CONTAINER_NAME: "nextcloud"
            NEXTCLOUD_CRON_MINUTE_INTERVAL: 5
            NEXTCLOUD_EXEC_SHELL: "bash"
            NEXTCLOUD_EXEC_USER: 99
        volumes:
            - "/var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro"
        network_mode: "bridge"
        deploy:
            resources:
                limits:
                    memory: "1G"

I'm currently further looking into perhaps tweaking some Google Mail or IMAP settings...

[elhananjair]

In my case, snappymail load mails faster like with in 3 seconds, but in Nextcloud Mail it takes more than 10 seconds

[cenobitz]

i tried to optimize services on dedicated server but no matter how you tune it ... nextlcoud mail is unusable because rendering simple email content in 4-8 seconds is joke with 0.14 load avarage, very low CPU utilization. I open simple email than open another and go back to that first and it is still rendering as the first time ... the worst thing is that without webmail the application loses its business sense, because why have a cloud with the ability to manage a team, when the most important function, i.e. webmail, is weak? scaling server is not a solution. 2 seconds is much for dedicated solutions. This is definitelly not acceptable for business standards

I dont even mention poor search.

Mail 4.3.1, Apache, Redis cache, mariadb, Nextcloud 30.0.8

[ChristophWurst]

Thank you for your feedback

[k3mist]

I am also having this issue on a private nextcloud installation over imap ssl/tls with self signed certs. cert size is 8kb.

listing emails is relatively quick but the body of any particular email takes quite awhile to load. somewhere around 8-15s probably on average.

ive been running my own private email server since 2005 and i have never seen email load this slow.

generally all my email clients regardless if its desktop or a mobile client load email pretty much instantaneously (<1s). i also have other close family and friends that i host email for and they report its instant.

but nextcloud mail is doing something out of band and not sure exactly what. imap in general is a decently fast protocol outside of search. container utilization is quite low as well. around 1-2% cpu

when inspecting the network calls it looks like nextcloud mail is retrieving different parts of the email separately but its not doing it asynchronously. each call/part is completed after the next waiting for the previous call to complete.

i think simply doing things in async would be a quick and good optimization. nonetheless there is something with the nextcloud imap implementation that appears to be very slow as you can see each call taking a few to several seconds to complete.

next cloud 31.0.4, mail 5.0.3, nginx, postgres.

dovecot on the email server.

edit: official signed certs make no difference, cert is 2kb