PSA: saying "I run Nextcloud and don't have any problems" doesn't help anyone or contribute anything useful to the conversation. It just makes you look like an insecure fanboy.

I used Nextcloud + Samba by the side for awhile, these days I use Samba exclusively, mounting takes basically no time whatsoever and syncthing for synchronization stuff

Synology Drive is rock solid. Not open source though if that's important to you and technically requires Synology hardware.

Did you tried installing it with snap?

Its just snap install nextcloud and you are done. No config no manual updates and iam having a good time with it. It was a bit tricky to change the main storage folder to another hdd, but its possible.

That maybe fix your Performance issues too if there is something configured wrong, in the other hand snap is a bit slower then a normal install.

If you are willing to consider commercial products, I can recommend Synology DiskStations (at least the plus series). Samba shares are quite easy to setup, you can use Synology Drive to sync a folder between workstations and Android phones which I use for Obsidian for note taking. They also have calendar options, but I use a hosted account at posteo for that.

If you want to stick to nextcloud but don't want to host it, you could consider Hetzner Storage Share. It's fully managed and worked great for me so far. But I only use it to share photos with others, so not all features.

Perhaps you need something to trigger the webcron so things don’t slow down to a crawl. I use uptime Kuma to trigger the webcron every five minutes and have never had any issues.

I use pydio for cloud drive. I think you can try this

You have not stated the hardware you are running this on. It makes a huge difference. Hope this is not Raspi?

Try Nextcloud-AIO and install the Preview Generator as well. (note that you will need to run it manually the first time). I did struggle as well, before I found the AIO. Now I'm happy. :-)

Don't get me wrong NextCloud is great and has a lot of helpful features out of the box, but I moved from this to just use;

• Samba: for mounting drives shares.
• CalDav: for shared calendars.
• CardDav: for shared contacts.
• Memos: for note taking, great little room that allows Markdown note with tagging for easy search and filter.
• Espo CRM: for logging communication with businesses, like utilities providers (comes in handy to refer to during disputes)

I'm also looking at installing a self-hosted office suite for word and Excel documents but haven't set this up yet.

I love idea of Nextcloud, but its overall concept of doing everything, but nothing well enough was one of the reasons I've decided to build S3Drive. We squeeze most of the "file-management" experience out of the protocol itself. That means that all you need to self-host is the S3 storage server (e.g. MinIO)... but if you don't feel like it just yet you can buy S3 from anyone else (e.g. Backblaze / Wasabi / Synology / Cloudflare etc.) and enable 100% Rclone compatible E2E encryption to protect your privacy.

Disable logging.

Sounds like you need a Synology NAS...