Is it measurably better? From a quick look, it’s PHP again (and if your NC runs slow, there’s a fair chance it’s not properly set-up/tuned), and SQLite (so, rather small scale).

I could give you plenty of reasons why you would be worse-off deploying from docker without deep understanding of what’s going on, but to only list a few out of the obvious pile:

• your container ships a bunch of things that you do not need and that take-up significant server resources. Not just nextcloud apps that you will never need but get loaded nonetheless, but also things like redis and a full-fledged collabora server that only make sense in a large-scale instances.

• your container isn’t tuned for your server because whoever made the container had no way to know that in advance. For instance, It might be that your php-fpm forks beyond your multithreading or IO capabilities, that your application cache isn’t adequate wrt. your system’s RAM memory, etc

• your containers duplicate functionalities from each other and from the operating system. You don’t need more than one http server, database, application process manager, interpreter, … but they add-up nonetheless and reduce the pool of available resources from the rest of the system and containers.

That’s your problem, just there: you deployed a one size fits all blackbox of a container that, by definition, on top of pulling all the inefficiencies and redundancies of docker, isn’t tuned for your specific hardware and operational needs. I get the appeal of containers, but if you want to self-host responsibly, you’ve got to be in control of what’s running and how.

Sorry if this sounds harsh.

And so damn easy to self-host in general. Ejabberd is batteries included down to offering stun/turn for audio/video calls, Erlang is just unrivaled when it comes to hot reloading so updates are effectively zero-downtime (unsurprising considering all the business critical environments it’s deployed).

At first (and especially because I went with Matrix originally) I wouldn’t think of self hosting all my instant messaging, but in retrospect, ejabberd is one of the easiest services I’ve got to maintain. I highly recommend everyone to give it a shot, especially to all the matrix refugees to whom it was a surprise/disappointment.