[tor-bugs] #32568 [Internal Services/Service - nextcloud]: nextcloud collaborative "pad" synchronization breaks down with multiple users

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Fri Nov 22 16:09:23 UTC 2019


#32568: nextcloud collaborative "pad" synchronization breaks down with multiple
users
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 Reporter:  anarcat                              |          Owner:
                                                 |  nextcloud-admin@…
     Type:  defect                               |         Status:  new
 Priority:  Medium                               |      Milestone:
Component:  Internal Services/Service -          |        Version:
  nextcloud                                      |
 Severity:  Normal                               |     Resolution:
 Keywords:                                       |  Actual Points:
Parent ID:                                       |         Points:
 Reviewer:                                       |        Sponsor:
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Comment (by anarcat):

 i just had a quick chat with micah about this, and here's a summary...

 for the sake of clarity, I'll start by naming things, because it's hard
 and i think a source of confusion:

  * '''onlyoffice''': the Nextcloud collaborative editor with support for
 Word and Excel documents, kind of like Google docs ('''installed on
 nc.tpo''')
  * '''etherpad app''', '''ownpad''': the
 [https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/ownpad Nextcloud Etherpad app] that
 bridges Nextcloud with an existing Etherpad lite instance ('''not
 installed on nc.tpo''')
  * '''markdown app''', '''text app''': the
 [https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/text Nextcloud Text app] that allows
 collaborative editing of text documents ('''installed on nc.tpo''').

 Let's take those one by one...

 == The text app

 The Text app we are having problems with in the meetings is built on top
 of [https://prosemirror.net/ Prosemirror], one of *many*
 [https://anarc.at/blog/2018-06-26-collaborative-editors-history/
 collaborative editors I have found in a previous research last year], and
 [https://anarc.at/blog/2018-06-26-collaborative-editors-history/ tiptap],
 a rich text editor built on top of Prosemirror. This app is
 [https://nextcloud.com/blog/nextcloud-introduces-collaborative-rich-text-
 editor/ fairly recent] (june 2019) and shipws with NC 17 by default.

 Micah told me the problems we are seeing are known, and others have
 suffered the same problems. He suspects the NC people haven't yet made the
 app scale to tens of users like we've seen in the vegas and metrics
 meetings (or at least, more than 10). This would confirm sysrqb's
 observations that it would fall apart under load. It works fine for a
 couple people, with some quirks, like a small scratch pad, but not so well
 for larger groups.

 There might be performance tweaks we could do in Nginx or elsewhere to fix
 the issue sysrqb observed.

 == The etherpad app

 This app is not yet installed on our instance, but could be. It was (or
 still is?) installed on nc.riseup.net but because Riseup's etherpad
 instance expires documents after a while, this led to data loss as the
 files disappeared from NC as well.

 So while we ''could'' deploy that app in our instance, it might lead to
 the same problem as there's no obvious marker that a pad will be removed
 in the NC UI. There is, of course, a huge warning in the pad itself when
 you first open it, but people forget about this all the time.

 If we use it only for ephemeral stuff like the vegas meeting notes, maybe
 that would be alright, but I would still be worried that people would use
 it for other things and lose data.

 Maybe we could just use Riseup's pad service for our meetings? Do we
 absolutely need this to be integrated in Nextcloud? If so we would have
 '''three''' different collaborative editors in nextcloud, which doesn't
 seem very reasonable to me...

 Alternatively, can't we just use meetbot to take minutes in meetings? :)

 == The onlyoffice app

 We *could* use the OnlyOffice app for meetings. We haven't tried that in a
 large scale yet, as far as I know. It might have exactly the same problems
 as the text app, maybe even worse because onlyoffice is much heavier. It
 would be worth a try, however.

 == TL;DR:

 Known issue. Needs debugging or we could just use pad.riseup.net or
 meetbot or onlyoffice for meetings.

--
Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/32568#comment:4>
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